OpenAI’s ads manager is live in testing — and far from finished
OpenAI is testing a self-serve ads manager for ChatGPT, and the urgency behind it is not subtle. The company burned through $8 billion in cash last year. That figure is projected to hit $25 billion this year and $57 billion the year after. Losses are expected to continue until 2030, when OpenAI projects it will turn cash flow positive and generate $40 billion in free cash. Advertising is central to that plan: OpenAI’s own projections put ad revenue at 36% of total revenue by 2030, or $102 billion of a projected $300 billion total.
To get there, it needs a self-serve marketplace where small and mid-size businesses set budgets, target audiences, and measure results without a salesperson involved. That is exactly what the ads manager is designed to be.
What the product looks like today
The dashboard bears a passing resemblance to Google Ads, according to a video reviewed by Digiday. But the functionality is thin. Right now, advertisers can only buy on a cost-per-impression basis. Cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition options are listed as “coming soon.” That means performance advertisers, who make up the bulk of the industry, have no practical reason to spend here yet.
Targeting is equally bare. Advertisers can input keywords or free-text hints and restrict by country. There are no demographic targeting tools and no audience buying options. Reporting covers impression and click graphs only. No audience size estimates, no optimization tools.
What is being built behind the scenes
The platform is being updated daily, according to an ad exec who spoke anonymously to Digiday. A/B testing infrastructure is already in place. Feature flags mean different advertisers see different versions of the product. Recent additions include bulk upload support and onboarding screens for new advertisers.
Still missing are user profile-building for targeting, conversion tracking, and advanced analytics. OpenAI has made clear to partners that the ads manager is not a side project. Without it, there is no ads business, and without that, the path to profitability is considerably harder.
The scale of what OpenAI needs to pull off
Nate Elliott, principal analyst at eMarketer, put the challenge plainly. Netflix, which has close to a billion users and introduced advertising three years ago, made $1.5 billion from ads last year, exceeding early projections. To hit its own target, OpenAI would need to grow its ad business roughly 20 times faster than Netflix has. And unlike Netflix, OpenAI does not have a proven, high-value ad format to anchor that growth.
The structural comparison to Google is also complicated. When Google launched AdWords alongside its self-serve manager in 2000, search volumes were already visible, so advertisers could price the opportunity from day one. Robert Webster, founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU, noted that right now advertisers do not know what a ChatGPT user is worth or what the right strategy is. The pilot is meant to answer those questions. The ads manager, in his words, is just plumbing.
The operator angle
If you run paid acquisition for a small business, there is nothing actionable here yet. No CPC buying, no audience targeting, no conversion tracking. Brand advertisers paying for impressions can experiment, but the ROI case is thin.
The more interesting signal is structural. OpenAI went from Sam Altman publicly dismissing advertising as a revenue model in 2023 to running a dedicated ads team, trading deals with agencies, and testing a self-serve manager in under three years. Eric Seufert, analyst at Heracles Media, noted that the SMB market is the only path to $100 billion in ad revenue, and self-serve is the only way to reach SMBs at scale. That race is now officially underway. Google’s Gemini has yet to make a serious move on advertising, which gives OpenAI a meaningful head start in the AI chatbot ad space, at least for now.
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