They’re dropping sidequests like Sora, and trying to catch up to rival Anthropic, which has a booming business selling tools to coders.
But OpenAI still wants to make money from people who will never give it a dime. It wants to do that by showing them ads.
And this chart from analysts at MoffettNathanson explains why:
It’s a simple argument, but I’ll spell it out here: As of January, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had some 900 million users. But the vast majority of them 850 million pay very little or nothing at all to use the services.* So OpenAI wants to turn those zero-to-little revenue-generating users into reliable revenue generators by showing them ads.
That’s it. That’s the post.
But, since you are still here: While OpenAI says its barely hatched ad program is already generating results the company has said it’s on track to generate $100 million a year in revenue, just two months into its ad launch it still has a very long way to go.
