ChatGPT has become the reference platform for information search for thousands of people around the world. And it seems that OpenAI is fully aware of this judging by the prices the company is willing to charge brands to display their ads on the tool.
According to The Informationthe company has established a premium pricing plan for its advertising proposal, of which it is already testing in the United States, as announced a few days ago. OpenAI aims to charge around $60 per 1,000 views, which would be approximately triple what ads typically cost in the Meta ecosystem.
The model would not currently offer detailed performance metrics
Despite a significantly higher price than competing platforms, the company will not offer advertisers the same level of information as Google or Meta. So they won’t get the detailed performance metrics, granular tracking of conversions, purchasing behavior, and demographic breakdowns that the big players have sophisticated over the years. OpenAI, for now, will only provide information related to total views or clicks.
This may be attributed to a product limitation, as the company’s advertising approach is still in development, or a direct consequence of its privacy commitments. When OpenAI presented its advertising model, it stated that it would not sell user data to advertisers and that it would guarantee the privacy of conversations with the chatbot.
This can create friction in advertisers’ expectations as it raises an implicit request for trust that ChatGPT is a sufficiently valuable and effective environment to justify higher prices. On the other hand, the company is sending a message to the advertising industry, that conversational artificial intelligence represents a new and different advertising context and, presumably, more valuable than traditional social networks.
The first ads will begin to appear in the coming weeks for users of ChatGPT’s free plan and Go, the cheapest subscription plan. Advertising, however, will not be shown to users under 18 years of age or in conversations linked to topics such as mental health or politics, with the intention of ensuring brand safety.
The inclusion of advertising in ChatGPT, as well as the prices that OpenAI proposes to set, increase pressure on the already competitive artificial intelligence sector. It is to be expected that both Google and Meta, which have promoted the integration of technology into their universe of products and services, will also develop their respective advertising approaches for their AI tools.
The response of brands to OpenAI’s strategy will also be decisive. If advertisers accept the company’s prices it would mean a review of the prevailing mentality in digital advertising, since it would mean valuing conversational context over analytics, at least until OpenAI optimizes its measurement in ChatGPT, if it does.
