The potential for OpenAI's advertising business is staggering. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that at their scale, monetizing just 0.22 ads per prompt (one in five) at a plausible $50 CPM for high-intent discovery would generate $25 billion in revenue, rivaling established ad giants.

Traffic from ChatGPT ads is expected to convert at a far higher rate than traditional search. Early advertisers can capitalize on this by buying ads for much less than their true value before the market matures and costs normalize, creating a significant arbitrage window.

While the market seeks revenue from novel AI products, the first significant financial impact has come from using AI to enhance existing digital advertising engines. This has driven unexpected growth for companies like Meta and Google, proving AI's immediate value beyond generative applications.

Aaron Levie suggests AI-driven advertising could provide better results than SEO-gamed search. Advertisers in an AI marketplace have a direct financial incentive to offer a good product because users will abandon a bad experience. This contrasts with SEO, where gaming algorithms with keywords is common, regardless of product quality.

To effectively sell ads, OpenAI must provide advertisers with targeting tools and performance data. This will inadvertently open up a treasure trove of analytics for all marketers, offering the first real glimpse into user behavior, popular topics, and prompt trends within ChatGPT.

Conversational ads offer an unprecedented one-on-one channel for brands to interact with customers at scale. The resulting data—customer questions, complaints, and feedback—is a goldmine for product development and other business functions, potentially exceeding the value of immediate customer acquisition.

OpenAI is testing ads on ChatGPT's free tier, mirroring the early monetization paths of Google and Facebook. This move signals the inevitable rise of generative AI platforms as a major advertising channel that marketers will need to understand and master.

Unlike search ads that target keywords, ChatGPT ads will target a user's intent inferred from a conversation. The system essentially qualifies the user's needs *before* showing an ad, resulting in traffic that is already in a buying mindset and more likely to convert.

OpenAI plans to personalize ads not just on immediate queries but by analyzing a user's entire chat history. This creates a powerful hybrid of Google's intent-based advertising and Meta's interest-based profiling, going beyond simple sponsored links to offer deeply contextual promotions.