OpenAI has opened its self-serve ads manager to all US advertisers, switching on ads.openai.com with cost-per-click bidding and dropping the $50,000 minimum spend that had gated its earlier pilot. The launch lands as the company tees up a public listing and tries to give Wall Street a credible second revenue engine alongside ChatGPT subscriptions.
Recommended starting bids run from $3 to $5 per click, a price floor that signals which advertisers OpenAI wants first. "OpenAI is really targeting, you know, premium, more premium products, five bucks a click," Jaeden Schafer said on the podcast, pointing to lawyers, dentists, doctors and high-ticket categories like hot tubs as the natural early buyers. Cheap commodity sellers, he argued, will struggle to make the math work at those click prices.
The platform ships with a performance marketer toolkit familiar to anyone running paid media on Meta or Google: a conversions API, pixel-based measurement and self-serve campaign management. Removing the five-figure minimum opens the door to small and mid-sized advertisers who were locked out of the pilot, and shifts OpenAI from a managed-sales model to volume self-service.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI flipped on self-serve ads at ads.openai.com for all US advertisers, with cost-per-click bidding starting at $3 to $5 per click.
- 02The company scrapped a $50,000 minimum spend that had gated its earlier pilot program.
- 03Internal targets, per Axios's Sarah Fisher, call for $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030.
- 04The 2030 goal roughly matches the current size of YouTube's ad business, signaling an aggressive push toward an IPO.
The financial ambition is the part that will draw investor attention. According to Axios's Sarah Fisher, OpenAI's internal goal is $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030 from the self-serve program. The 2030 figure is roughly the size of YouTube's entire ad business today, an aggressive marker for a product that went live this week.
“OpenAI is closer to Meta's starting position than Google's.”— Jaeden Schafer
Not every analyst is convinced the comparison flatters OpenAI. Robert Webster, who runs the AI marketing consultancy TAU, argued that "OpenAI is closer to Meta's starting position than Google's," on the basis that ChatGPT users are not expressing the kind of purchase intent that powers search ads. The implication is that monetisation will look more like social feed advertising than the high-yield keyword auctions that built Google.
Schafer pushed back on that framing on the show. He noted that ChatGPT conversations often replace Google queries outright, with users typing the same kinds of questions they would have run through a search bar. "In fact, a lot of people have replaced Google searches with just talking to Chad Chuptee or another AI model," he said, suggesting the intent signal in chat logs may be richer than skeptics assume.
For OpenAI, the launch also fits the IPO narrative the company is building. A working ads business with disclosed revenue targets gives bankers and public-market investors something to model beyond ChatGPT Plus seats and enterprise API contracts, and it diversifies the dependency on Microsoft as a cloud and distribution partner. Hitting even a fraction of the $2.5 billion 2026 target would put the segment on a faster ramp than most consumer ad platforms managed in their first year.
The risks cut both ways. Premium CPCs only work if conversion rates justify the price, and OpenAI is asking advertisers to trust an attribution stack that has existed for weeks rather than years. But with the minimum spend gone and the auction open, the company is about to get the data it needs to find out whether a chatbot can sell hot tubs at $5 a click.
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