Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Ads in ChatGPT. It’s finally happening…

OpenAI Lines Up Advertisers, Reveals Key Details Ahead of Ads Launch🔒
Source: The Information
January 20th, 2026

Summary: OpenAI is launching ChatGPT ads in early February. The company has lined up dozens of advertisers for a test run, asking each for “less than $1M in spending commitments over several weeks.”

Here are OpenAI’s Ad Principles:

OpenAI is charging based on ad views (CPM model), not clicks (CPC model) like Google and Amazon do for search ads. This mirrors how Meta prices social media ads. It's still not clear what the best model for chatbot ads will be. AdAge is reporting that OpenAI will charge $60 CPMs, more than streaming TV ad rates!

ChatGPT has about 900M weekly active users. Ads will show to US users on the free tier and the new $8/month tier, not on the $20/month or $200/month tiers. OpenAI doesn't have self-service ad buying yet—it's all manual sales for now, though they're working on building self-service capability. 

The ad effort is led by Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications. Simo previously ran Instacart and was an exec at Facebook. OpenAI previously told investors it expects to generate about $2B this year and nearly $11B next year from products for non-paying users, including ads and shopping. The company is trying to raise as much as $100B from investors, so building a strong ad business quickly would help their pitch.

Advertisers and agencies are intrigued by ChatGPT ads thanks to the huge user base and the personalized nature of chats, which could make ads more effective.

Opinion: Woowee! It’s finally happening! Ads in AI! I guess it’s “last resort” time for Sam.

Sorry, Sam. But for us advertising folk, ads in AI chat represent arguably the most powerful and potent “new” advertising channel for marketers since … search? This moment could represent the beginning of an entirely new era for advertising.

Unlike search, which captures one-dimensional intent in a singular moment, AI chat can capture multi-dimensional intent across multiple conversations, with context that builds and evolves over time through memory. It presents a completely different, and much richer relationship between user, platform, and advertiser. Which presents incredible opportunities for advertisers to do things that have never been done before.

Of course, they’ll have to get the model right. There are so many questions that will have to be answered: Is it brand or performance (we think it HAS to be performance), is it self-service or managed service (we think it HAS to be self-service), is it on-platform or off-platform ads, is it enterprise-focused or for the mid / long-tail, is there sight-sound-motion or text only, and on and on and on. Also, another important question: Will ChatGPT operate like the other big walled gardens, or perhaps a hedged garden? Will they build, buy, or rent ad tech? And the biggest question of all: Will they ever let advertisers influence actual answers? Right now they’re saying they won’t, but Sam also said ads were a last resort. So you never know. Advertisers influencing answers could be a massive revenue unlock for OpenAI but could also greatly erode user trust. Time will tell where ChatGPT lands on all of these questions. We’ll be watching closely.

In the near term, this news is going to have all sorts of immediate effects on the industry. Here are some we can think of right off the bat:

AI advertising will work. There’s no question about it. The question is whether OpenAI can responsibly scale advertising and make it “work” to the degree that Meta and Google have, while maintaining trust and continuing to grow their user base. What could go wrong?

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