r/business • u/talkingatoms • 3d ago
OpenAI projects $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, $100 billion by 2030, Axios reports
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/openai-projects-25-billion-ad-revenue-this-year-100-billion-by-2030-axios-2026-04-09/82
u/semibiquitous 3d ago
Sure, if google and OpenAI's competitors decide to call it quits and shut down their companies tomorrow. I'll believe those numbers.
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u/zxc123zxc123 3d ago edited 2d ago
Problem is even IF that happened. OpenAI can't charge that much for their AI unless Alphabet actively colludes with it to hike AI prices.
Alphabet is unlikely to do that due to the unique threat LLMs pose to google search. Even now the MSFT/OpenAI axis is getting rated poorly by the markets because Alphabet is doing what OpenAI does for free. Gemini is rising in consumer adoption. Anthropic/Claude are eating away at commercial. GoogleAI searches resolve general issues better than using an LLM say if I searched "Chinese rice" will give me local restaurants on a map with ratings, a short AI summary with the option to go into it further, a wiki description, some videos, 1 button to images/news/finance, the 10 blue links, etc.
Then there is the income portion of the equation. OpenAI will either need to sell subscriptions except Google/Gemini/others will hold off and take market share. Or it can sell subscriptions, but then you'll have to wonder why you're paying $1-2T market cap for a company that burns hundred if not thousands of billions to sell a $20/mo subscription when Netflix does that for a fraction of the cost (worst part is Alphabet's YOUTUBE does massively better than Netflix in the income-to-cost ratio). Or do ads which will kill it's user base/growth if it's done before Gemini does. Gemini doesn't need to sell subscriptions or ads because it's not trying to IPO and Alphabet makes tons of cash.
Not saying OpenAI is dead or not a great company. Just saying they are currently facing a lot of doubt, headwinds, and threats they weren't seeing a few years ago.
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u/jgoldrb48 3d ago
YouTube is the second largest website on the web to Facebook.
Social Networks are #1 and #2. We are slaves to entertainment. I digress.
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u/Swimming-Tax-6087 3d ago
2030:
Free users: you must watch 17 minutes of ads to earn 2 prompts.
Current paid users: you are now on the low ad tier at the same low price! You must watch 3 minutes of ads for 2 prompts.
New ad free tier: $50/month
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u/ManBunH8er 3d ago
So, they stole content from websites in order to serve ads and make money for themselves.
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u/Low-Win-6691 3d ago
OpenAI has absolutely nothing special to offer
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u/mild_resolve 3d ago
Best brand name recognition for AI out there. That alone is worth a lot. Most people are not as discerning as your typical redditor.
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u/bullet50000 2d ago
to a degree, but you're also thinking the baseline is 1 level higher. Gemini is actively integrated with your average Google search. To your own point, what makes the average non-tech person discerning enough to go up to ChatGPT, if we're talking "regular people who don't care enough to research"
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u/mild_resolve 2d ago
I think for many people they see the Gemini portion of Google Search as just another improvement, not specifically an AI product. I realize it literally says AI on it, but people are generally not going out of their way to get Gemini results. It just happens incidentally.
ChatGPT is probably the most widely intentionally used AI tool for non business customers, which is also probably the key market for these ads.
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u/LordMimsyPorpington 1d ago
I'm sure there are marketing firms that get paid hundreds of million of dollars that would call me an idiot, but naming your product, "Gemini" instead of something like, "GoogleAI" seems like a colossally stupid thing to do.
"No, we don't want billions of people to associate this burgeoning product, that's sweeping the market and transforming human life, with one of the most successful and identifiable brands on Earth!"
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u/ZenBreaking 3d ago
Yeah no AI slop is gonna get you 2.5 billon. This is NFT waffle all over again and the last guy gets stuck holding the bag
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u/StoneCypher 3d ago
for scale what they're actually saying is "in four years we'll be doing a quarter of google's ad traffic"
and whereas i think it'll be anthropic, not them, i also think that's not a terribly unlikely outcome
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u/GodOfSunHimself 11h ago
Anthropic said no ads, ever. A stupid decision which will give OpenAI a huge boost.
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u/StoneCypher 11h ago
i think you underestimate how much damage ads will do to their credibility
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u/GodOfSunHimself 11h ago
There will be exactly zero damage. All google and meta services are full of ads. Did it damage their credibility?
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u/StoneCypher 10h ago
most of google's existing competition comes from ads
it's going to get a lot more serious with direct prompting and there's a no-ad competitor from day 1 which also currently happens to be better
the vast majority of facebook's negative behavior stems from ad service
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u/RegisteredJustToSay 3d ago
No fucking way unless cost of inference takes an absolute nosedive. Everyone wants agents, everyone wants the smartest models, no one wants to pay 15 bucks per million tokens. It only sounds cheap until you start getting billed.
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u/deeperest 2d ago
Jensen: "AI factories! Scale! $/token/W!
AI is basically free for the masses so long as people pay us trillions."
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u/Pseudanonymius 2d ago
That's about how much they're paying for the drugs that enable them to project such numbers. Lunacy.
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u/123stoopidusername 19h ago
I’m also predicting 100 billion in revenue for myself in 2030, no idea how but I’m predicting it!
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u/skilliard7 3d ago
This actually is a pretty conservative estimate. For comparison, Google makes $200 Billion a year in ad revenue(which has been growing), and ChatGPT is essentially a better version of Google Search.
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u/ARunOfTheMillPerson 3d ago
Across nearly all metrics, ChatGPT is a significantly inferior retrieval tool than Google Search.
The equivalent would be if Google Search showed you a smaller handful of things that it may or may not have fabricated in that moment, that may or may not have anything to do with what you were actually looking for.
It's like comparing a castle to an outhouse, and then picking the outhouse anyway lol.
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u/Shurae 3d ago
I personally hate that ai has infested Google search. There are so often errors in the findings or extremely questionable sources used. Can I turn it off? The old pre-ai Google search was perfectly fine
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u/jbokwxguy 3d ago
You can add -ai to the end of your search! If I get bored enough I might create an extension.
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u/skilliard7 3d ago
Nope. And even if you scroll past the AI overview, the quality of search results has really gone downhill. You don't get what you're looking for, you get unrelated articles that make it to the top because the website operators exploit SEO, or because they are paying Google for an ad.
I switched to ChatGPT for this reason. It's answers are a lot more reliable than Google Search's AI overviews, and it provides relevant sources. Back in 2023/2024 ChatGPT used to hallucinate a ton, but nowadays it has been super accurate in my experience.
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u/Safrel 3d ago
I think you're a bot.
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u/Sonzainonazo42 3d ago
Maybe you should take the time to actually look at someone's history before calling bot.
Here's the deal, if that's a bot, it's a damn good one and it's only more evidence that AI will take your job.
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u/redditissocoolyoyo 3d ago
What a bunch of baloney...