By now, it’s arduous to disregard the place OpenAI is headed.
The manager hints, the advert world hires, the burn charge that will make tech CEO blush – all indicators level to promoting. This week’s launch of its long-rumored browser solely reinforces that view. Digiday traces the steps that introduced the corporate to this inevitable second.
December 2024: OpenAI reverses anti-advertising stance
Final December, the corporate’s CFO Sarah Friar made it publicly clear: OpenAI had “no lively plans to pursue promoting”, however the crew was open to exploring new income streams, she instructed the Monetary Instances.
That was an enormous step on from the preliminary venom expressed in the direction of promoting by CEO Sam Altman. He’d beforehand publicly stated he hated promoting “as an aesthetic selection” and referred to it as a “final resort” for the corporate. “Advertisements-plus-AI is… uniquely unsettling to me,” he stated throughout an interview at Harvard College in Could 2024.
At the moment Friar made this 180 shift, OpenAI had reported an annualised income of about $4 billion, but additionally had an annual anticipated money burn (minus spend income) of $5 billion, in response to the Monetary Instances.
Merely put, as a lot as Altman hated the thought of it, the crew needed to not less than start to rethink their stance. The tech they construct and run is a expensive effort, and one which requires a constant, secure income stream.
April 2025: Nice expectations
Simply 4 months on, inner paperwork forecasting “free person monetization” (often known as promoting) have been leaked. OpenAI optimistically projected it may usher in $1 billion in 2026, and $25 billion by 2029. For context, Amazon – now the third largest digital promoting firm on the planet – generated $56 billion in advert income final yr, however it’s capable of promote commercials towards the NBA, The Rings of Energy and its huge commerce information reservoir. OpenAI’s userbase is actually huge, however regardless of person demand for its chatbot to switch their therapist or govern their courting lives, it’s much less clear whether or not the knowledge it holds on its customers would meet advertisers’ wants.
Caveats apart, that OpenAI sits on a monetisable viewers isn’t unsure. “Anyone with eyeballs has a really viable alternative to generate vital income. It’d be very quick sighted for anybody to say that this wouldn’t be one thing they have been going to contemplate doing,” stated Michael True, CEO of advert measurement agency Prescient. “I believe it’s a enterprise determination that open AI goes to should strongly take into account, and as they begin to inch in the direction of it, I believe you’re they’re going to grow to be one of many main sources of search and promoting stock,” he added.
Could 2025: OpenAI poaches Instacart’s CEO Fidji Simo
After becoming a member of OpenAI’s board in 2024, Simo was tapped for the CEO of purposes function in Could, which sees her report immediately into the corporate’s CEO Sam Altman.
Previous to her four-year stint heading up Instacart, Simo spent a decade at Meta, the place she began her journey heading up the launch of promoting in Fb’s information feed, and in the end ended up main the Fb app.
“Fiji Simo ran numerous product for Fb for a very long time,” stated Jim Louderback, CEO and editor of Contained in the Creator Financial system e-newsletter. “She then went over to Instacart to be CEO for some time. However she got here into OpenAI to run product a few months in the past. You possibly can already see that what she discovered at Fb, she’s utilized to Sora. You possibly can see her fingerprints on this one, which is nice. I’m an enormous fan of hers.”
July 2025: Sam Altman says “I’m not completely towards adverts” for ChatGPT
9 months after dismissing adverts as a mandatory evil, Sam Altman is singing a unique tune. On the debut episode of The OpenAI Podcast, he conceded that adverts may not be so dangerous in any case. Seems, spending $2.5 billion has a means of fixing your rules.
In dialog with host Andrew Mayne, Altman stated: “We haven’t achieved an promoting product but” – “but” being the important thing phrase.
“I’m not completely towards it,” he added, saying that he really enjoys adverts on platforms resembling Instagram (and had even purchased gadgets from them). However equally Altman acknowledged that any step in the direction of incorporating or constructing an advert product would “take numerous care to get proper.”
Aug 2025: Nick Turley says adverts potential if achieved proper
Virtually three years on from its preliminary launch, OpenAI launched GPT-5 for ChatGPT. The push didn’t go nicely, with customers complaining of misplaced performance, hallucinations and a perceived lack of expressiveness. That very same month, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, went on the marketing campaign path in an interview with The Verge, boasting that the app had hit 700 million lively customers whereas continueing to progress OpenAI’s reluctant embrace of promoting.
“The factor that makes ChatGPT magical is the truth that you get one of the best reply for you and there’s no different stakeholder within the center… we’re not attempting to upsell you,” he stated. “We’d should be very considerate and tasteful about it.”
Quickly sufficient, these phrases would flip into motion.
September 2025: OpenAI’s emptiness for an ad-platform engineer and seek for a monetization chief
OpenAI laid the foundations for adverts experience with the rent of Simo. What higher subsequent step than to rent somebody to supervise the monetization technique, and particularly, carry adverts to ChatGPT? Simo is already on the hunt for somebody to supervise all monetization efforts for the enterprise, together with subscriptions, in response to Sources, that’ll report on to her.
Per Sources, she’s already assembly with potential candidates, together with a few of her former Fb colleagues, so it gained’t be lengthy earlier than a shortlist of names begin doing the rounds.
Plus to get the ball rolling, OpenAI posted a emptiness for a San Francisco-based development paid advertising and marketing platform engineer, with a wage vary between $160,000 to $385,000 plus gives fairness. The function sits inside ChatGPT’s development crew, and might be liable for constructing and scaling programs that energy OpenAI’s advertising and marketing channels and spend effectivity, in response to the submit.
October 2025: OpenAI launches Sora 2 app and its ChatGPT-Atlas browser
When a platform is aware of it’s taking place the adverts path, the following step is discovering surfaces for them to seem.
First up, there’s Sora – OpenAI’s standalone AI-content app, which launched on Sept. 30, for iOS units within the U.S. and Canada solely – for now. And we’ve already seen how adverts can match into the likes of Meta’s Instagram, or TikTok, seamlessly.
This was quickly adopted by its launch of ChatGPT Atlas – OpenAI’s long-awaited browser, which places ChatGPT on the heart of it. And Google’s Chrome is a reasonably good measure of how adverts will be built-in into the person expertise with search.
Let’s discuss numbers
Operating an AI firm is an costly enterprise, least of all once you’re quick monitoring AI content material apps and browsers – arguably taking over two, if not three of the most important tech gamers on the earth: Google, Meta after which TikTok (from a doom-scrolling content material perspective).
Which is why each platform on the market does the anti-ads dance earlier than backtracking and in the end incorporating them sooner or later.
Income-wise, the corporate generated $4.3 billion in the course of the first half of 2025, which means the corporate was on observe to achieve its $13 billion full-year projection, in response to The Data. Nonetheless, throughout H1 2025, OpenAI additionally burned by means of $2.5 billion, partly due to the prices it incurred on analysis and improvement for its AI fashions.
Added to that, the corporate recorded a $7.8 billion operation loss in the course of the first half of the yr, per The Data. And that’s not even the worst of it. OpenAI expects to burn by means of $115 billion by means of 2029, earlier than it lastly turns a revenue in 2030 – a results of the projected $450 billion value it has to pay to lease servers from cloud suppliers.
In terms of downloads, ChatGPT reached round 500,000 downloads inside its first week (again in 2023), in response to TechCrunch, when the app was nonetheless solely out there on iOS units within the U.S.
OpenAI managed to beat its personal document, with the launch of its standalone AI-video app, Sora. The AI-content app smashed ChatGPT’s document to grow to be essentially the most downloaded app inside lower than per week. OpenAI’s head of Sora, Invoice Peebles posted on X that the app had reached 1 million app downloads in lower than 5 days – even sooner than ChatGPT reached that milestone.
Clearly, the corporate is reusing its previous playbook for engaging consideration to its apps. On the time of publishing this text, Sora continues to be simply invite-only within the U.S. and Canada, for iOS units.
