OpenAI is looking to bring in new revenue, and introducing ads to ChatGPT could be one of the ways to accomplish that goal. In a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said he’s “humble enough not to rule it out categorically” but noted that the company needs to “be very thoughtful and tasteful” about how ads are integrated.
“We will build other products, and those other products can have different dimensions to them, and maybe ChatGPT just isn’t an ads-y product because it’s just so deeply accountable to your goals. But it doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t build other things in the future, too,” Turley noted.
“Maybe there is a certain market where people aren’t willing to pay us, yet we want to offer the best, latest, and greatest. Maybe that would be a place to consider other indirect forms of monetization,” he added.
“If we ever did that I’d want to be very, very careful and deliberate because I really think that the thing that makes ChatGPT magical is the fact that you get the best answer for you and there’s no other stakeholder in the middle. It’s personalized as to your needs and tastes, etc. But we’re not trying to upsell you on something like that or to boost some pay-to-play provider or product. And maybe there are ways of doing ads that preserve that and that preserve the incentive structure, but I think that would be a novel concept and we’d have to be very deliberate,” the OpenAI executive further noted.
ChatGPT recently surpassed 700 million total weekly users, but only 20 million of them are paid subscribers. As per an earlier Bloomberg report, OpenAI is expected to generate around $12.7 billion in revenue through its subscriptions this year, but the AI startup is still not expecting to be cash-flow positive until 2029.
Speaking about the huge number of free users of ChatGPT, Turley said, “I actually don’t view the fact that the vast majority of our users are free as necessarily a liability. I really think it’s a funnel that we can build off of to build differentiated offerings for people who are willing to pay.”
