$60 CPM, No Conversion Tracking, $200K Minimum. Advertisers Can't Sign Up Fast Enough.

Imagine pitching a client this: "We'll charge you three times what Meta charges, give you no conversion tracking, no audience builder, no A/B testing, and you'll need to commit $200,000 upfront. Also, we just started, so the reporting is basically vibes."

Any sane media buyer would laugh you out of the room. Omnicom signed up 30+ clients in the first week.

That's the ChatGPT ads story, and it tells you everything about where advertising is headed.

OpenAI Copied Google's Entire Playbook (Including the People)

On February 9, OpenAI flipped the switch on ads inside ChatGPT for US users. But if you think this was a rushed side project to make some revenue, look at who they hired.

Shivakumar Venkataraman — 21 years at Google, ran Google's search ads. Kevin Weil — built Instagram's ad product, then Twitter's. Sarah Friar — scaled Nextdoor's ad platform as CFO. This isn't a startup experimenting with monetization. This is the Google Ads founding team reassembled under a different logo.

Internal projections: $1 billion in ad revenue this year, $25 billion by 2029. For context, Google Ads did about $300 billion last year. OpenAI isn't trying to be an ad-supported chatbot. They're building the third pillar of digital advertising after search and social.

How the Ads Actually Work

Two formats, both appearing below ChatGPT's response, labeled "Sponsored."

Sponsored Banners show up when your conversation matches an advertiser's category. Ask about project management tools, see a SaaS ad. One unit per response.

Product Carousels are the more interesting play. Think Google Shopping inside a chat. Horizontal strip of product cards with images, prices, stock availability, delivery estimates. OpenAI has live data partnerships with Etsy and Shopify, so if you're asking about birthday gifts, you see actual products you can buy.

Who sees them: Free and Go plan users only. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education are ad-free. No ads for users under 18. No ads near health, mental health, or politics.

Here's the math that matters: ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users. Only about 20 million pay for premium tiers. That's roughly 97.5% of the user base seeing ads. Now you understand why every major agency showed up on launch day.

The Targeting Is the Whole Game

Forget everything you know about audience building. No cookies. No pixels. No behavioral profiles. No demographic targeting.

ChatGPT reads the intent of your current conversation and matches it to advertisers. That's it. You're talking about meal planning, you see HelloFresh. You're researching home office setups, you see furniture ads.

This sounds simple but it's a fundamental shift. On Meta, you target people based on who they are. On Google, you target based on what they search. On ChatGPT, you target based on what they're actively thinking through in real-time, expressed in full sentences, with all the context a conversation provides.

People don't type "best CRM" into ChatGPT. They say "I'm running a 12-person sales team, our pipeline is a mess, we tried HubSpot but the reporting sucks, what should I switch to?" That's a level of intent signal that no ad platform has ever had access to before.

Advertisers never see the actual conversations. They get aggregate impressions and clicks. But the matching engine sees everything.

The Pricing Is Insane. And It Doesn't Matter.

$60 CPM. That's 3x Meta, 6-30x standard display. Minimum buy-in: $200,000, with some agencies reporting pitches at $250,000. Impression-based, not performance-based.

No self-serve dashboard. No audience builder. No A/B testing. No conversion pixel. No purchase attribution. You go through OpenAI's sales team or an agency partner, wire your $200K, and get back what amounts to a glorified impression report.

On paper, this is a terrible deal. In practice, Target, Adobe, Ford, Mazda, Audible, HelloFresh, Williams-Sonoma, Albertsons, and Audemars Piguet all signed up anyway.

Why? Because every one of those brands has a media team that watched cookies die, watched organic reach collapse, and is staring at a future where AI answers questions instead of sending people to websites. ChatGPT ads aren't a media buy. They're a hedge against irrelevance.

Some early data floating around suggests AI-referred traffic converts at 5x Google's rate. Proving that with ChatGPT's current reporting is impossible. But the hypothesis makes sense — someone mid-conversation about what to buy is a fundamentally better ad moment than someone scrolling past vacation photos.

What This Means If You Actually Buy Ads for a Living

If you're at a brand with budget for experimental channels, this is worth testing right now. Not because the measurement is there — it isn't — but because early movers on every major ad platform have gotten favorable treatment. Google's early advertisers. Facebook's early advertisers. TikTok's early advertisers. The pattern is consistent: get in before the auction gets crowded, and you get cheap inventory and platform attention.

If you're at a startup burning $30K/month on Meta and Google, this isn't for you yet. The $200K minimum alone makes that obvious. But pay attention, because OpenAI will build a self-serve platform with lower minimums. They always do. That's when smaller advertisers should be ready to move fast.

And if you're a founder who isn't advertising at all — this is still your problem. Because ChatGPT just went from "neutral tool that might recommend your product" to "ad platform that will recommend whoever pays." The organic free ride in AI is officially over.

The Real Question Nobody's Asking

Everyone's debating whether $60 CPM is worth it. That's the wrong question.

The right question is: what happens when 800 million people start getting their product recommendations from an AI that sells ad space? What happens to your SEO strategy when the thing people ask instead of Googling is now monetized?

OpenAI didn't just launch an ad product. They fired the starting gun on the biggest shift in digital advertising since mobile. Search and social had a 20-year duopoly. ChatGPT just crashed the party, and they brought Google's best people with them.

The waitlist is at openai.com/advertisers. Whether you sign up or not, the game just changed.