Free users are costly for OpenAI. One of its biggest challenges throughout this change will be introducing ads at scale, without deteriorating trust or pushing users to competing chatbots, like Google\u2019s Gemini or Anthropic\u2019s Claude.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not going to be easy for ChatGPT to, let’s say, erode the quality of the experience without losing a lot of users,\u201d says Stefano Puntoni<\/a>, a marketing professor at Wharton who researches generative AI. Neither of OpenAI\u2019s main competitors features sponsored ad buttons in the outputs, though Google recently said it\u2019s not ruling it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sometimes, when I asked a question with a name brand in the prompt, like DoorDash or Netflix, the ad below the answer was for one of the company\u2019s direct competitors. Toubia describes this as \u201cpoaching\u201d and says this technique is a longtime staple of digital advertising in search engines. \u201cThat definitely has been a key engine behind the growth of online advertising,\u201d he says. \u201cIt seems like it’s going to be the case also with [large language model] advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n Right now, OpenAI is hiring for multiple positions, from software engineers to marketing leaders, to work on this core integration of ads. One of the open positions on OpenAI\u2019s site is for a \u201cproduct marketing lead, advertising,\u201d and part of the role’s responsibilities is to \u201cidentify product risk areas (e.g., performance, safety, policy, trust) and drive cross-functional plans to mitigate them.\u201d Ads come with risks, and how they\u2019re executed will shape the future of the company.<\/p>\n If I exclusively used the free tier of ChatGPT, the introduction of these ads would have me considering other AI tools. Even with OpenAI\u2019s explicit ad policies, there\u2019s an aura of surveillance these ads introduce<\/a> to the user experience, which is more personal with a chatbot compared to the traditional Google Search experience. While I know advertisers can\u2019t currently influence ChatGPT\u2019s outputs or see my chats, the incessant ads below answers made the conversations seem less private, and I felt hyperaware of the personal data I was sharing with this bot.<\/p>\n After this limited rollout in the US, OpenAI will move to the next phase. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback. These positive signals support moving into the next phase of our pilot,\u201d reads an update on OpenAI\u2019s website dated March 26<\/a>. The company is expected to expand this ad push to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n Everything is on the line for OpenAI as this ad rollout spreads to more ChatGPT users.<\/p>\n \u201cThe worst thing the company could do is to go in very aggressively, to do it in a way that’s basically maximizing conversions and referrals but at the same time undermining people’s confidence and trust in those recommendations,\u201d Puntoni says. \u201cThen, that will basically be the end of it, because there’s no point using a chatbot you don’t trust.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Free users are costly for OpenAI. One of its biggest challenges throughout this change will be introducing ads…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51302,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19371,175,25,580,157,30383],"class_list":["post-51301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-ads","tag-advertising","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-openai","tag-virtual-assistant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}