But OpenAI still wants to make money from people who will never give it a dime. It wants to do that by showing them ads<\/a>.<\/p>\n And this chart from analysts at MoffettNathanson explains why:<\/p>\n ChatGPT has lots of users, but only a sliver of them are paying for the service. The rest could see ads.\u00a0<\/p>\n MoffettNathanson<\/p>\n It’s a simple argument, but I’ll spell it out here: As of January, OpenAI’s ChatGPT<\/a> had some 900 million users. But the vast majority of them \u2014 850 million \u2014 pay very little or nothing at all to use the services.* So OpenAI wants to turn those zero-to-little revenue-generating users into reliable revenue generators by showing them ads.<\/p>\n That’s it. That’s the post.<\/p>\n But, since you are still here: While OpenAI says its barely hatched ad program is already generating results \u2014 the company has said it’s on track to generate $100 million a year in revenue<\/a>, just two months into its ad launch \u2014 it still has a very long way to go.<\/p>\n The company is just beginning to build out the team and tech it will need to run a truly meaningful ad business<\/a> \u2014 it just hired<\/a> a top Meta exec to run sales \u2014 and for quite some time, ChatGPT ads are likely to be something ad buyers experiment with, but don’t rely on. Analyst Michael Nathanson says that while the company has been looking to charge advertisers $60 for every 1,000 impressions<\/a>, it has been settling for something closer to $15 per 1,000 as it gets up and running.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n