Advertising was always going to come for AI chatbots. The real question is how

"OpenAI announced it would soon trial advertisements in free and low-tier versions of ChatGPT, after months of speculation that they would do exactly that. As of early February, these tests are now live. The likely reason is simple: artificial general intelligence remains distant, costs are staggering, and investors are impatient. Subscriptions are not enough."

"Millions already use these systems to answer questions and seek recommendations, particularly younger users. That is an audience advertisers will pay handsomely to reach. And there is plenty of money involved in advertising. According to WPP Media, global ad revenue excluding U.S. political advertising will grow 8.8% in 2025 to $1.14 trillion."

"We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers, declared not some critical tech scholar but Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in an early paper. Today, their creation, Google, derives most of its revenue from ads."

AI companies, particularly OpenAI, are turning to advertising as a revenue model for free and low-tier ChatGPT access. Despite high operational costs and investor pressure, subscriptions alone prove insufficient to sustain these services. The global advertising market, valued at $1.14 trillion in 2025, presents a lucrative opportunity. Millions of users, especially younger demographics, already rely on AI systems for information and recommendations, making them attractive to advertisers. This shift follows a predictable pattern in tech history: Google founders initially warned against advertising bias, yet Google now derives most revenue from ads. Similarly, Netflix's leadership once called advertising exploitative, but the company now generates over $1.5 billion in ad revenue annually. The inevitable logic of free services ultimately leads to monetization through advertising.

Read at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism