OpenAI stunned the advertising world this month when it announced its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT will do $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year despite launching its ads business in only February.
The projections, OpenAI said, put the company on pace to earn $100 billion in annual ad revenue by 2030. To put that in perspective, that’s a third of the ad revenue Google generated in 2025 ($294.69 billion) and more than half what Meta generated ($196.18 billion), and those companies are decades old, whereas OpenAI was founded in 2015.
And the hype, according to ad industry executives, is very much real.