OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Ads in India, one of its largest markets, as the artificial intelligence company looks to build new revenue streams ahead of a potential IPO.
The ads will be shown to logged-in adults using the Free and Go plans. The Go plan costs ₹399 per month in India, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education users will continue to have an ad-free experience.
For its India advertising rollout, OpenAI has partnered with WPP and Omnicom. More than 50 brands are expected to begin advertising this week, with the self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager set to launch on September 4.
India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, with more than 100 million weekly active users as of February. Globally, ChatGPT reached 1 billion weekly users earlier this month.
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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 even remove advertisements from ChatGPT's responses and it will still be optimized to be relevant to users, OpenAI said. It has also announced that it will not give its users' data to advertisers, and the users' chats, chat history, memories and other data will not be available. Rather, advertisers will receive performance data, which will be 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. Also, certain topics that are sensitive such as health, mental health or politics will not be displayed 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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In June, OpenAI said it had filed for an IPO under the name ‘Confidentially’, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Anthropic followed suit, both saying they were the first to go for an IPO with the SEC. 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.