The number of businesses advertising on ChatGPT roughly tripled between late August and the start of October, reaching about 60,000, according to a New Street Research tally. The underlying mechanism is less flattering than the growth curve suggests: OpenAI is pricing inventory to move. Business-software advertisers are paying around $5 per click, against $30 to $50 for comparable clicks on Google.

That gap is the story. It’s also a tell about how OpenAI is thinking about this quarter.

The lab crossed a $1 billion annualized run rate as self-serve opened on Aug. 31, with the advertiser base then described as being in the tens of thousands. Six weeks later the roster has tripled while prices have been cut to roughly a sixth of Google’s. OpenAI pitched investors on $2.4 billion of 2026 ad revenue. Emarketer, cited by Adweek, caps the entire U.S. standalone-chatbot ad market under $1 billion this year. The gap between the pitch and the ceiling is close to an order of magnitude.

Behind the pricing is a hiring sprint with Meta’s fingerprints on it. Dave Dugan, hired in March as vice president of global ad solutions, spent more than 12 years at Meta before joining OpenAI. Roughly 37% of the ad team came from the same place. Nearly half of the ~140-person group arrived between July and September. Dugan has restructured sales into industry-specific vertical teams that mirror the Meta and Google playbook, and the ad group itself has been reorganized seven times since the U.S. test launched Feb. 9.

“We’re hiring from a diverse range of companies across the industry, with no single company focus,” Dugan said, a line whose composure is doing a lot of work given the team’s provenance.

The surrounding product moves fit the pattern of a platform building footprint before it builds margin. The self-serve Ads Manager beta opened May 5 with cost-per-click bidding and campaign measurement. Visual ads launched in October. Geographic availability expanded from more than 40 countries in August to more than 60 now. Reseller partnerships have been signed. Advertiser feedback, per CryptoBriefing, is mixed: some report favorable performance against incumbents, others cite measurement and relevance problems that would be familiar to anyone who watched Meta’s early ad stack mature.

The $5 CPC isn’t an equilibrium price. It’s the price of a platform that needs auction density more than it needs revenue, hiring the people who built the last auction to run the next one. The advertisers walking in now are being paid, in effect, to show up.

Sources