ChatGPT hit 60,000 advertisers. The window to influence it is closing.
ChatGPT’s advertiser count just tripled in a little over a month. More than 60,000 advertisers are now buying ads on the platform, up from more than 20,000 roughly five weeks earlier. That data point, reported by New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon from an event hosted by OpenAI and AppsFlyer on October 7, is worth sitting with for a moment.
The Growth Trajectory
Growth began with roughly a few hundred advertisers on ChatGPT in February. Based on comparable growth rates from Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap, MediaPost editor in chief Joe Mandese projects ChatGPT will surpass 500,000 advertisers within the next year. He notes that Facebook took nearly six years to reach that same milestone.
Why SMBs Are the Real Story
The same engine driving ChatGPT’s advertiser growth drove Facebook’s: self-service ad management that lets small and medium businesses run on the same platform as the biggest brands in the world. Mandese argues it was the 500,000 advertiser mark when SMBs surpassed Fortune 1,000 brands in share of Facebook advertising, and from that point, the ad industry’s ability to influence Meta’s policies began to decay.
The 2020 Facebook advertiser boycott is the clearest proof point. When the world’s largest advertisers pulled spend for the month of July, Facebook’s ad revenue rose during the quarter. SMB volume absorbed the gap. Big brands are high margin but not high leverage when a self-service marketplace is running underneath them.
The Operator Takeaway
For solo operators and small businesses, this is a window. ChatGPT’s self-service ad system is built for you, not for agency holding companies. You can run on the same platform as global brands right now, before the market matures and CPMs adjust accordingly.
For anyone who cares about influencing how frontier AI companies handle advertising ethics and policy, Mandese’s argument is direct: the time to push is now, before SMB volume makes large advertiser pressure irrelevant. WPP Media’s Kate Scott-Dawkins has described the ad-supported AI marketplace as a kind of “manifest destiny.” At the current growth rate, that destiny arrives sooner than most ad industry players are planning for.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
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