The cost of advertising on ChatGPT is falling fast. The CPM - cost per thousand impressions - charged to reach users of OpenAI's platform has dropped from $60 at launch nine weeks ago to as low as $25 today, according to a Digiday report published today. Some buyers, purchasing via Criteo, have reported CPMs as low as $35 to $25 in recent days, while Ad Age has reported figures as low as $15, though the sourcing of that lower figure remains unclear.

The decline is significant not just for the number itself, but for what accompanies it. OpenAI has simultaneously cut the minimum advertiser spend threshold from $250,000 at the pilot's inception to $50,000 now, widening the pool of buyers eligible to participate and, in doing so, introducing a broader range of willingness to pay.

From $250,000 to $50,000: The entry barrier comes down

When ChatGPT's advertising pilot launched on February 9, 2026, the minimum commitment stood at $200,000 to $250,000, depending on who was negotiating. The figure was a deliberate filtering mechanism - a way to restrict entry to well-resourced advertisers willing to commit to a channel with limited inventory, no pixel-based attribution, and no self-serve tools. Some agencies were informed the floor was as high as $250,000; OpenAI confirmed $200,000 to Adweek.

That threshold has now reached $50,000. As PPC Land reported on April 13, 2026, the barrier-lowering arrived alongside the quiet launch of a self-serve ads manager, giving a subset of pilot advertisers the ability to monitor impressions and clicks in real time. The ads manager remains in an early phase. According to an OpenAI spokesperson quoted by Digiday, "As part of the pilot, a subset of advertisers are beginning to test an early version of an ads manager platform. This is still an early phase, and we're using it to gather feedback as we continue refining the tools."

The combination of a lower entry threshold and a nascent self-serve interface suggests a deliberate shift in the composition of OpenAI's advertiser base. Bringing in smaller buyers at this stage expands inventory pressure and, as the Digiday report notes, with it the range of what advertisers are willing to pay.

Auction dynamics, or something different?

In most digital advertising markets, CPM fluctuations are explained by auction dynamics. More buyers competing for the same inventory drives prices up. Fewer buyers, or more inventory, brings them down. But ChatGPT does not yet operate a live auction. The price signals emerging from the market reflect something subtler - a combination of negotiated minimums, early-stage test budgets, and the aggregate willingness of pilot advertisers to keep spending.

Ad agency Jellyfish is currently onboarding its first client into the pilot. According to Jai Amin, the agency's chief of media activation, the $60 base rate holds, but he has been seeing averages closer to $45 depending on composition for inventory. One advertising executive, speaking on condition of anonymity to Digiday, reported seeing CPMs between $35 and $25 when buying via Criteo.

Ashley Fletcher, CMO of Adthena - whose clients have been part of the ChatGPT ad pilot since the February 9 start date - offered a structural interpretation of the price movement. "It feels like everything is coming down, preparing for a wider auction accessibility to fit [a] global rollout," Fletcher said. That framing positions the price decline not as a sign of weakening demand, but as preparation for a transition to an open, internationally accessible auction system.

Criteo became the first formal ad tech partner in OpenAI's ChatGPT pilot on March 2, 2026, connecting approximately 17,000 advertiser clients to ChatGPT's Free and Go tiers in the United States. The Criteo route is where several of the lower CPMs are reportedly being observed, which may reflect the platform's existing commerce pricing infrastructure rather than any deliberate OpenAI pricing decision.

The measurement gap remains the central problem

A falling CPM does not resolve the more fundamental challenge OpenAI faces in this market. The platform still lacks a pixel or any standard attribution infrastructure that would allow advertisers to measure conversions with the precision they expect from established channels. Post-click attribution is relatively straightforward. Post-view attribution at $25 to $60 CPM is considerably harder to defend without independent measurement.

Robert Webster, founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU, put the issue directly in the Digiday report. "Google and Meta own industry measurement, and that's the real moat, not the UI," Webster said. "Post-click is easy. Post-view at $60 CPM is hard. Until someone independent can verify what a ChatGPT impression is actually worth, advertisers are taking OpenAI's word for it. That's where the $102 billion projection lives or dies."

That $102 billion figure is OpenAI's own internal projection for ad revenue by 2030. The gap between where the platform sits now - a pilot with several hundred advertisers, no live auction, no pixel, and a CPM that is actively declining - and that projection is, by any measure, considerable. The company is bringing in $2.5 billion this year across all revenue lines. Google and Meta together generated over $300 billion in advertising revenue in 2025.

As PPC Land covered after the $100 million annualized revenue milestone was disclosed on March 26, 2026, roughly 85% of ChatGPT users are currently eligible to see advertisements, yet fewer than 20% encounter them on any given day. That gap between eligibility and exposure has been a deliberate choice, but it also means substantial monetizable inventory is being left unused.

Cost-per-action and cost-per-click models are described as in development, alongside conversion tracking that would provide the attribution infrastructure the current pilot lacks. If those capabilities land, the CPM debate may become secondary. Performance advertisers, who have long accepted higher costs on channels that can demonstrate measurable outcomes, would be better positioned to justify the spend.

Benchmarking the price against the wider market

Even at $25, ChatGPT sits far above the mainstream of digital advertising. According to Gupta Media data cited in the Digiday report, Facebook averages $4.82 per thousand impressions, Instagram $7.63, Google Display $10.33, and TikTok $3.02. These are mature platforms with years of scale, established measurement, and documented return on investment behind them.

The more instructive comparison, according to the same report, may be LinkedIn, currently at $39.19 CPM. Advertisers have long accepted LinkedIn's premium pricing because the professional context justifies it - the argument being that the audience's specificity and purchase authority warrants paying more per impression than on a mass-market social platform. OpenAI is making a comparable contextual argument, positioning ChatGPT users as high-intent participants in active decision-making conversations. The platform's claim is that someone interacting with a conversational AI about a product category is closer in mindset to a search query than to passive social scrolling.

Internal Criteo data from a sample of 500 US retailers observed in February 2026 found that users referred from LLM platforms including ChatGPT converted at approximately 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels. The sample is narrow - 500 retailers from a single month - but the directional claim is what the industry has been watching. If LLM-referred users are consistently further along in purchase consideration, the premium pricing has a commercial foundation.

The comparison to Netflix's advertising launch is also instructive. Netflix entered its ad-supported tier in 2022 at CPMs of around $55 to $65. Within a year, those CPMs had fallen to $20 to $30 as inventory scaled and buyer confidence grew. The pattern of an elevated launch CPM followed by compression as supply increases and measurement matures is not unusual. What is different for OpenAI is the pace. Nine weeks into its advertising business, the CPM has already moved from $60 to $25 at the low end - a steeper and faster compression than Netflix experienced.

Netflix, however, had an established value exchange with its users. Subscribers understood the proposition: content of recognized quality, funded partly by advertising, at a lower subscription cost. ChatGPT's appeal has been built partly on the perception that its answers are unmediated. When it recommends a product or service, users have assumed that no commercial relationship underlies the recommendation. Introducing advertising makes that perception harder to sustain, regardless of OpenAI's published commitments to keep paid placements separated from organic responses.

Nine weeks, four structural changes

The pace at which OpenAI has assembled its advertising infrastructure since the pilot launched is notable. In nine weeks, the company has moved from no advertising business to a self-serve ads manager, a Criteo partnership, a dramatically reduced entry threshold, and a dedicated advertising leader.

David Dugan, a former Meta advertising executive, was named to lead OpenAI's global advertising solutions team on March 26, 2026, alongside the disclosure of the $100 million annualized revenue milestone. As PPC Land reported, the ads manager currently supports only reach campaigns, priced on a CPM basis. Clicks and conversions are listed as coming soon. Daily budget controls are also forthcoming. Reporting currently tracks impressions and clicks.

An Adthena intelligence report published in April 2026, drawing on more than 29.1 million queries across ten or more industries and three markets, documented that ChatGPT's CPM stood at $60 with a $200,000 minimum commitment as of the report's data collection window ending in March 2026. The downward movement captured in today's Digiday report therefore reflects very recent developments - price changes occurring in April, after the bulk of that earlier data was gathered.

The speed of OpenAI's infrastructure build reflects the commercial pressure the company faces. The $102 billion ad revenue projection for 2030 does not allow for a slow build. Google and Meta have not paused their own advertising development in the interim. Google expanded AI Overview ads to 11 countries on December 19, 2025, and continues to develop AI Mode shopping ad formats that place commerce advertising directly inside conversational search responses.

The advertising test launched on February 9 for logged-in adult users in the United States on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers remain exempt. OpenAI confirmed on January 16, 2026 that advertising would come to ChatGPT, ending months of speculation that had followed a December 2025 "code red" directive that had actually paused advertising development to redirect resources toward product quality.

Whether the CPM stabilizes, continues falling, or recovers as performance data accumulates will determine whether the $102 billion projection is a credible roadmap or a number that outlives the optimism that produced it

Timeline

Summary

Who: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and the advertisers and agencies participating in its advertising pilot, including ad agency Jellyfish (with Jai Amin as chief of media activation), Ashley Fletcher (CMO of Adthena), Robert Webster (founder of TAU), and unnamed advertising executives buying via Criteo.

What: The CPM rate for advertising on ChatGPT has fallen from $60 at the February 9, 2026 launch to as low as $25 today, nine weeks into the pilot. Simultaneously, the minimum advertiser spend threshold has dropped from $250,000 to $50,000. OpenAI has also launched a self-serve ads manager, currently tracking impressions and clicks only, with cost-per-click and conversion tracking described as forthcoming.

When: The price decline is being reported as of April 17, 2026. The advertising pilot launched February 9, 2026. OpenAI first confirmed advertising plans on January 16, 2026.

Where: The advertising pilot operates in the United States, covering ChatGPT's Free and Go subscription tiers. International expansion to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was announced on March 26, 2026.

Why: The CPM decline reflects multiple converging factors: the lowering of the minimum spend threshold to $50,000, which has introduced a broader pool of advertisers with varying price expectations; the absence of a live auction, which means pricing is still driven by negotiated agreements rather than competitive bidding; and what Adthena's CMO described as deliberate preparation for a wider global auction rollout. The core commercial challenge - proving to performance advertisers that a ChatGPT impression is worth paying a premium for, without independent measurement tools - remains unresolved.

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