Ads in ChatGPT: OpenAI Asks Triple Meta's Price for a "Pig in a Poke"

While the whole world debates when artificial intelligence will replace programmers, Sam Altman is busy with a far more down-to-earth question: how to turn millions of conversations about the meaning of life and Python code into hard currency. OpenAI has finally settled on what its audience's loyalty should cost. The price is $60 per thousand impressions. For context, that is roughly three times the average rate on Meta's platforms, where ad algorithms have been honed for decades. OpenAI seems to believe that a brand's mere presence inside ChatGPT has a magical quality worth overpaying for.

The intrigue lies not only in the price but in what exactly the advertiser gets for the money. The answer may disappoint any marketer used to counting every cent. OpenAI does not intend to share deep analytics. Forget conversion data or tracking a user's path from a chat question to buying sneakers. Brands will get only dry figures: how many times the ad was seen and how many times it was clicked. That takes us back to the era of television ads or highway billboards, when a company pays for "reach" and hopes for the best, with no way to measure the return on its spending precisely.

This approach looks like a deliberate risk. Google and Meta built their empires on total tracking, knowing more about us than we know ourselves. OpenAI is trying to sit on two chairs: launch an ad machine while keeping the image of a privacy defender. It does not want to turn ChatGPT into an ad hell where every second word is a sponsored link. But brands will have to pay for this "exclusivity" and lack of intrusiveness. In essence, the company is selling not just ad space but access to the most advanced and engaged audience in the world, even if only through a keyhole.

On the other hand, OpenAI's appetite is easy to explain with economics. Training and running models on the level of GPT-4o costs staggering sums, and $20-a-month subscriptions clearly do not cover all the costs of electricity and Nvidia chips. Advertising is an inevitable stage in the maturing of any mass-market technology product. The only question is whether it will mark the beginning of the end of the "clean" experience of interacting with AI that we all came to love. If a chatbot starts recommending a specific brand of coffee in response to a question about staying alert, the magic of the "smart assistant" could evaporate fast.

The industry is waiting for the first results. If big players like Coca-Cola or Nike accept these terms, it will set a new standard in the market. We will see the formation of a completely different type of marketing, where the context of a conversation matters more than browser search history. But if advertisers rebel against the lack of transparency, OpenAI will have to either cut the price or open up its data, which it has so carefully avoided. Either way, the era of free, clean AI for everyone is coming to an end, giving way to the classic capitalist model.

The bottom line: OpenAI is trying to sell the status of "pioneer" at an inflated price, but how long will brands be willing to pay for reach without clear analytics?

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.