Remember when Altman literally said in 2024 that ads are a last resort for them?
Well. Here we are.
What gets me isn’t the $100M itself — it’s that they hit it while the product is basically still in beta. Less than 20% of users see ads daily. No self-serve tools yet. No international rollout yet. 600 advertisers but most needed a $200K minimum just to get in.
They haven’t even opened the floodgates and it’s already nine figures.
The part I keep thinking about: Google built an empire on search intent — people typing what they want. ChatGPT has something different. People explain their whole situation to it. That’s a completely different level of signal for an advertiser.
Whether they can scale this without killing the trust that makes the product work in the first place — that’s the actual story.
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