Реклама в ChatGPT: OpenAI просит втрое больше Meta за «кота в мешке»

While the whole world debates when artificial intelligence will replace programmers, Sam Altman is busy with a far more mundane question: how to turn millions of conversations about the meaning of life and Python code into hard currency. OpenAI has finally figured out how much user loyalty should cost. The price: $60 per thousand impressions. For context: that's roughly three times higher than the average rate on Meta platforms, where advertising algorithms have been perfected over decades. It seems OpenAI believes that simply being present inside ChatGPT possesses some magical property worth overpaying for.

The intrigue here lies not only in the price but in what advertisers actually get for their money. The answer might disappoint any marketer used to counting every penny. OpenAI has no intention of sharing deep analytics. Forget about conversion data or tracking the user journey from a chat question to buying sneakers. Brands will receive only bare numbers: how many times the ad was viewed and how many times it was clicked. This takes us back to the era of television advertising or highway billboards, when companies pay for "reach" and hope for the best, with no ability to measure their investment's effectiveness precisely.

This approach looks like a deliberate gamble. Google and Meta built their empires on total tracking, knowing more about us than we know about ourselves. OpenAI is trying to have it both ways: launch an advertising engine while maintaining an image as a privacy advocate. They don't want to turn ChatGPT into an ad hellscape where every other word is a sponsored link. But brands will have to pay for this "exclusivity" and lack of intrusiveness. Essentially, the company is selling not just advertising space, but access to the most progressive and engaged audience in the world, albeit through a keyhole.

On the other hand, OpenAI's appetite is easy to explain through economics. Training and maintaining models at the level of GPT-4o costs astronomical sums, and $20-per-month subscriptions clearly don't cover all the electricity and Nvidia chip costs. Advertising is an inevitable stage in the maturation of any mass-market technology product. The question is only whether this will be the beginning of the end of that "pure" AI interaction experience we've all come to love. If a chatbot starts recommending a specific coffee brand in response to a question about staying alert, the magic of an "intelligent assistant" could quickly evaporate.

The industry is holding its breath waiting for the first results. If major players like Coca-Cola or Nike agree to these terms, it will create a new market standard. We'll see the formation of an entirely different type of marketing, where dialogue context matters more than browser search history. But if advertisers rebel against the lack of transparency, OpenAI will have to either lower its prices or open its databases—something they've worked so hard to avoid. In any case, the era of free and pure AI for everyone is coming to an end, giving way to a classical capitalist model.

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