OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads previously ran validation in Asia-Pacific markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and India, and has recently further expanded to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan Province.
Advertisers for ChatGPT Ads can access it through official and third-party ad agency channels; I won't list the specifics—anyone not in this business wouldn't recognize them anyway.
Ads are mainly shown to Free and Go users. Pro and above membership tiers are not served ads. If ads were actually served to them, it feels like OpenAI would be finished—paying to watch ads.
Just brainstorming: perhaps in the future Pro members could be given the option to watch ads, and we could precisely match advertisers based on your chat history. Maybe one of them would be to your liking.
Or through AI shopping, ads could still be indirectly pushed to Pro users.
I remember Doubao also had similar ads before. When answering, it attached hotel booking links and took a commission per booking. I didn't follow up on later progress. OpenAI covers similar Q&A scenarios: travel planning, software recommendations, buying home goods, etc. The more advertisers there are, the more matching can be provided.
Data released by OpenAI this time shows that less than 200 days after Ads launched, annualized revenue reached 1 billion USD. It currently covers more than 60 countries/regions and will continue to expand in the future.
Although compared with AI's own revenue, the share of Ads revenue is not high, this is still real revenue. There is no doubt that this revenue will further expand.
I don't know why, but writing here, I suddenly thought of Baidu.