OpenAI is bringing advertising on ChatGPT to 26 more countries, taking total availability to 89 markets worldwide. Announced Wednesday, the expansion is the company’s largest single rollout outside Europe and a clear signal that advertising is now a core pillar of OpenAI’s revenue strategy.
The new markets span Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. OpenAI began testing ads on ChatGPT in the US earlier this year, and says more than 100,000 advertisers have since run campaigns on the platform. In August, the company said its ads business had reached an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion.
Importantly for users, ads appear only on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free. OpenAI says sponsored placements are clearly labeled and kept separate from the chatbot’s answers. Advertisers in the new markets can buy through technology partners or self-serve via OpenAI’s Ads Manager, and the company plans to add more ad formats, campaign objectives, and measurement tools as the rollout continues.
The move puts OpenAI in more direct competition with search advertising, as rivals like Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude explore their own monetization paths. With a potential IPO on the horizon, diversifying beyond subscriptions has become essential to funding the massive infrastructure costs behind frontier AI models.
Source: Reuters via Northland News Radio
