Targeted Ads on ChatGPT

OpenAI is introducing Ads

OpenAI is introducing ads on ChatGPT Free and Go tiers under four pillars. The biggest one is that ads do not influence the answer AI gives you. The thing is, it does exactly that. Just not directly.

Yes, in an ideal world a ChatGPT ad at the bottom of the page has nothing to do with the content above, it’s a random display ad like in any cheap mobile game. But OpenAI is doing the exact opposite. Information about the user is not shared with the advertiser, but the advertiser is promised that ads will be shown to users who fit the profile best and are most likely to convert, based on the current conversation. If you’re thinking about what to do for dinner, you might get an ad for groceries.

Chatbot platforms know you

And people have no idea how much OpenAI knows about you. We think Instagram, TikTok and the like know all about you to tailor the algorithm, but people simply forget what they feed daily into ChatGPT. Every little prompt tells a whole story about a totally different aspect of your life. Point is, OpenAI knows where you work, about your family, your medical issues, your interests, friends, values, motivation, depression, thoughts, projects, your lifestyle, and from that everything else follows. How your mind works, how you think, how you act under pressure, what softens you, what your trigger points are, how much confidence you have, how much structure you need.

It’s that 24/7 friend on your side. And no, I am explicitly a person who does not use ChatGPT for everything. In fact, I mostly use Gemini and Claude (and still love good old Google searches). I’m not alone in this, this is general. People are so scared of the data social media accumulates on them, but totally forget the power LLMs hold. Here’s what ChatGPT and Claude answer to me asking “what do you know about me?” on a new chat, purely based on their memory features. I’d say Claude nails it better than ChatGPT in this case, but both are incredible. Again, these are not things I told it explicitly, those are things it combined through many many chats with ChatGPT/Claude.

And now take all of that to display the right ad at the right time and you get the most converting ads there could possibly be. Yes, they’re at the bottom of a response, but they fit the content and your profile so well that it makes no difference whether they’re in the message itself or below. It’s the reason OpenAI can charge these prices for ads, because they simply convert. We don’t have the data yet, but if we look at clicks/conversions per ad , the CPM of 60 USD of ChatGPT is probably cheap compared to Google’s and Meta’s advertisement offerings.

So let’s say you’re reading a ChatGPT response about a topic, and ChatGPT is telling you to buy something (not an ad, not mentioning a brand). And below that you see a product recommendation. It knows you like nature-based products so it shows you exactly that.

It’s the same exact thing as if it had put the link into the response directly and marked it as an ad.

Ads become invisible

What Google taught us is ads get more and more discrete. Google ads used to look like this, highlighted in yellow or in a sidebar, and today it’s often hard to tell if a result is an ad or not.

So even if OpenAI stays true to their pillars and ads remain separate from the output content, the line between ad cards, ChatGPT apps, and other dynamic content info cards will blur. In fact, this already happened the other way around, before ChatGPT had even introduced ads. Something that looked like an ad was in fact a ChatGPT app suggestion and no ad at all. (95% of people don’t know the Apps SDK exists, it’s brilliant, check it out!).

For obvious reasons OpenAI has disabled app suggestions for exactly that reason. But they’re still all for UI embeds in chats (me too, it’s the future of computing), and whether a UI embed is an ad, an app suggestion or some genuinely useful UI will be announced less and less clearly, similarly to how Google changed marking ads on the search page.

I don’t blame OpenAI for introducing ads in ChatGPT. It’s a great and safe way to make money. People just need not to forget how to think.