ChatGPT's ads are a lot like San Francisco’s infamous billboards
OpenAI's advertising push on ChatGPT is heavily dominated by B2B software companies, mirroring the tech-heavy billboard culture of San Francisco. While the company has reached a $1 billion ad run rate, it still has significant room to grow its reach among users.
Why it matters
The success of ChatGPT's advertising model is a critical component of OpenAI's strategy to generate sustainable revenue ahead of a potential IPO.
Highway 101 in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A new report from Graphite shows the dominance of B2B software in ChatGPT's advertising. OpenAI is now more than 6 months into its ads push, and says it hit a $1 billion run rate. Graphite has positive news for the AI company: less than half of ad-eligible users are seeing ads. San Francisco's stretch of Highway 101 is infamous for billboards that peddle wonky software to other tech companies. ChatGPT, invented nearby, is so far more of the same. Ads pitching business software to corporate buyers made up the largest category of ad impressions on ChatGPT from March to August at almost 20%, a new study by marketing agency Graphite found. Another 8.5% of ChatGPT ad impressions in the period promoted business and professional services and 4.6% plugged developer tools, according to the report, which analyzed Similarweb user data.
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