OpenAI aims to earn $11 billion from ChatGPT advertising by 2027, but the pilot CPM is only sold at $15.

ME News Report, April 16 (UTC+8), according to Beating Monitoring, OpenAI is about to introduce a pay-per-click (CPC) model for ChatGPT ads and is exploring conversion-oriented advertising formats (driving purchases or app downloads), but the latter has no clear timetable yet.
The current state of advertising business shows a significant gap between ambitions and reality.
Since February this year, OpenAI has been displaying ads to logged-in U.S. users on the free and lowest-priced paid versions of ChatGPT, initially targeting CPM (cost per thousand impressions) as high as $60, comparable to premium advertising slots on streaming TV.
However, some advertisers have only achieved actual transaction CPMs of $15 to $25, possibly reflecting too few buyers bidding for ad space.
The pilot period has also been extended: ad display frequency is insufficient, and early advertisers had not spent their budgets by the end of March.
At the end of March, OpenAI stated in a blog that the six-week pilot exceeded $100 million in ARR, but did not specify the calculation method.
In Q1, OpenAI told investors that it expects advertising revenue to reach $2.4 billion this year and $11 billion by 2027.
If the latter target is achieved, its ad scale will far surpass Snap and Pinterest.
The core dissatisfaction among advertisers is the lack of effect tracking.
Meta and Google provide detailed audience profiles and conversion attribution, while OpenAI currently only offers aggregated data (impressions, clicks, spend).
Ben Kahan, head of programmatic business at marketing agency Brainlabs, said: “Many clients with budgets wanting to try new channels are watching because they feel they can’t get the desired performance data.”
OpenAI is accelerating its learning curve.
In recent weeks, it has opened a self-service management backend to some advertisers, who previously relied on spreadsheets and phone calls for campaigns;
It has partnered with ad tech company Criteo for resale;
New signed advertisers now have a minimum monthly commitment of $30k to $50k, with early prepayments of $200k.
However, targeting capabilities remain a weakness, as advertisers can only provide broad keywords as guidance, unable to target specific prompts or user types precisely.
Ad formats are limited to short titles with small images, which Jellyfish chief solutions officer Jai Amin described as “quite old-fashioned.”
The real challenge for OpenAI in advertising is not technology but managing advertisers’ expectations.
Traditional digital advertising has evolved over twenty years into a complete attribution system from exposure to conversion, with advertisers accustomed to pay-for-performance and precise targeting.
ChatGPT’s conversational interaction naturally makes this logic hard to apply: each response is dynamically generated, with no fixed page to anchor ads, and it cannot bid on keywords like search ads.
Shifting from CPM to CPC and conversion-based billing is the right direction, but to truly compete with Meta and Google, OpenAI needs to address not only billing models but also the entire ad measurement and targeting infrastructure.
(Source: BlockBeats)