OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ads to India, Its Second-Largest Market
OpenAI has expanded ChatGPT Ads to India, one of its largest markets, as the artificial intelligence company seeks to diversify revenue ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO).
Ads will appear for logged-in adults using the Free and Go plans, with Go priced at ₹399 per month in India. Sponsored products or services may appear below responses and will be clearly labelled. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education users will remain ad-free.
OpenAI has partnered with WPP and Omnicom for its India advertising launch. More than 50 brands are expected to go live this week, while the self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager will launch on September 4, with daily campaign budgets starting at ₹725.
India is OpenAI's second biggest market, with over 100 million users active every week as of February this year, among students, developers, teachers and businesses. Earlier this month, ChatGPT hit 1 billion weekly users around the world.
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Dave Dugan, OpenAI's vice president and head of global ads solutions, said, "India is one of the most dynamic markets in the world for how people use ChatGPT to learn, build, and discover. Our weekly active users have doubled year-on-year, with many of them going beyond simple searches and changing how they make decisions."
The AI will not include ads in ChatGPT's answers and it will still be optimized for relevance to users, OpenAI said. The company stated that it won't sell user information to advertisers, and that users' chats, chat history, memories, and other personal information will not be available. Instead, advertisers will be given performance information, in the form of a total number of impressions and clicks.
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Users who have stated that they are under 18 (or OpenAI believes they are) will not have ads displayed to their accounts. Sensitive topics like health, mental health or politics will also not be shown with ads.
In January, OpenAI announced its plans to test ads in ChatGPT. The pilot was launched in the United States in February, and reached $100 million in annualized revenues in six weeks. It has since spread to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea and last week to 31 European countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
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OpenAI announced in June that it had "confidentially" applied for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), while Anthropic made the same move, with the two firms claiming they are the first to do so. In the June quarter, OpenAI's revenue jumped 36 percent to $6.7 billion from $5.7 billion in the prior quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports, and its operating loss increased to $12.3 billion from $9.3 billion in the quarter.