Original Coverage & Source Attribution: digiday.com
In case anyone at Advertising Week New York had lost track of why ChatGPt carries ads, OpenAI’s Samantha Jacobson offered a reminder that the company pursued it “so that all of humanity could benefit from AGI”.
Jacobson, OpenAI’s vp of monetization partnerships, made the claim during a panel question about privacy and consumer trust, and her version of the ad-funded bargain sounds a lot like the ones that came before it. Ads cover the people who won’t pay for ChatGPT, since “not everyone’s going to be able to,” she said. She then drew comparisons to Paramount’s subscription tiers, priced by how many ads a viewer will sit through, with owner Skydance’s ad tech boss Derek Michael a few seats away on the same stage.
But a pre-roll costs a Paramount viewer a few minutes. Free ChatGPT asks for something more personal since its ads are matched to what someone is asking and, unless they switch personalisation off, to signals from their wider use of the product. People raised on the ad-funded internet learned the hard way that when they don’t pay for a product they become the product, and that lesson leaves OpenAI with a delicate bargain to sell. Jacobson, naturally, was keen to stress that “consumer trust is the single most important thing,” and that the company would protect it “even if it’s at the expense or revenue or other partnership opportunities”.
Jacobson would say that, of course. OpenAI is trying to sell people’s attention to advertisers at a time when much of that attention comes laced with dread. That unease makes a chatbot a stranger home for ads than a search box or social feed. ChatGT gets confessions about marriages and money worries, often from people who feel uneasy about the tech listening in the first place.
What’s more, platforms have made trust pledges before. Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 over its privacy promises, and data on up to 87 million people was later harvested through a quiz app and passed to Cambridge Analytica, which led to a $5 billion FTC penalty claim in 2019. Internal research leaked in 2021 showed Meta knew Instagram could harm teenage girls and dozens of states have since sued the company over features they say kept kids hooked.
Google went public in 2004 under the motto “Don’t be evil” and federal judges have since ruled it illegally monopolized both search and ad tech. Robert Burns had a line about the best-laid plans of mice and men, and the ad business has given it plenty of fresh material. OpenAI may well hold the line. The people asked to take its pledge on faith have watched earlier ones age and they’ll judge this one by what the ads business does when its $2.5 billion revenue target gets harder to hit.
Part of OpenAI’s answer sits in how Jacobson thinks about data. Asked whether the first-party data the industry has spent years accumulating still matters, she said “knowing who the person is, I think matters less.” Put another way, the profile used to stick together (where someone lives, how many kids they have, what car they drive and so on) counts for less in her view than what the person is trying to do at that moment. She described past attempts at personalization as something that “felt really creepy” and argued that ads built around a person’s question would land as help.
There’s a commercial logic under this philosophy. OpenAI’s published ad principles promise to keep conversations private from advertisers and never sell user data to them, and the company has talked about guardrails to prevent narrow ad targeting. A platform that has ruled out handing advertisers granular audience data needs them to believe intent beats identity.
“It doesn’t really matter who I am or some of the other third-party attributes we’ve targeted in the past,” Jacobson said. “Instead, it’s all about, based on the conversation and what you’re looking for, how can I enrich that experience.”
The business funding that mission has moved fast. OpenAI started selling ads in ChatGPT in February and opened a self-serve Ads manager in the U.S. in May. At the end of Agust, it said ChatGPT ads had hit a $1 billion annualized run rate, with tens of thousands of advertisers and availability in more than 40 countries.
The company reportedly told investors it expects $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and is targeting $100 billion by 2030.
