OpenAI's advertising unit, roughly 200 days old, has reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate.
The company began testing ads in the United States in February, and the format had already hit $100 million in annualised revenue within six weeks, a pace that has continued to accelerate.
ChatGPT Ads is now available in more than 40 countries.
OpenAI is opening self-service access to marketers in India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa on Monday, allowing businesses to build and manage their own campaigns without going through an advertising agency first.
How the ads work
Ads appear only for users on OpenAI's free tier and its lower-cost Go subscription plan, which together make up the vast majority of ChatGPT's roughly one billion weekly active users.
OpenAI said the ads are clearly labelled, kept separate from how ChatGPT generates its answers, and that advertisers cannot see what users discuss in their conversations.
The company introduced cost-per-click pricing earlier this year, a billing model that charges advertisers only when a user clicks an ad, alongside its original pricing based on impressions.
In India, one of ChatGPT's largest markets by weekly users, ads launched last week with 50 brands participating at rollout, backed by partnerships with the agencies WPP and Omnicom.
Part of a wider push
"Our next phase of growth will bring ChatGPT Ads to more markets," the company said in a release, adding that it plans to introduce additional formats, objectives, buying options and measurement tools.
OpenAI is targeting $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for the current year.
The company is tracking toward annualised revenue exceeding $40 billion, roughly double its run rate at the end of 2025.
Positioning for an IPO
The advertising push follows a rapid pilot earlier this year and forms part of OpenAI's broader effort to diversify its revenue streams ahead of an expected initial public offering.
Alongside advertising, the company generates revenue through enterprise contracts, consumer subscriptions and usage-based API access, the fees it charges other businesses for building on top of its models.
The milestone comes weeks after OpenAI's advertising ambitions drew criticism from rival Anthropic, which took aim at the strategy in a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year.
