The number that stopped me was four dollars.
Four dollars for a single click. That’s what OpenAI’s ad platform wanted me to bid to put a message in front of someone using ChatGPT. I looked at it and thought it was punking me. Four dollars, every time one person taps once.
I know what a click is worth, because for years I was the one getting paid for it.
In 2003, Google launched AdSense, and I put it on WorldVillage.com, the site I’d been running since back when we still capitalized the W in Web. On a good day it pulled a few hundred dollars while I was asleep. I ended up writing a book about how it worked. The AdSense Code made the New York Times list in 2006. Everything I understood about the internet came down to one plain idea: attention pools in certain places, and wherever it pools, somebody sells the space beside it.
The web didn’t arrive with alot of ads. But it sure ended up plastering them everywhere.
First came the banners nobody clicked, starting with a single AT&T ad on HotWired in 1994. Then Google figured out how to match a small text ad to what you were already searching for, and the money got serious. Social media ran the same play on your friends list. Your phone learned it in your pocket. Every medium that gathered a crowd for free eventually rented out the room, because free was never free. Someone always pays. Usually it’s an advertiser, and what you pay back is a little of your attention.
Who thought that this wouldn’t happen with AI?
These models cost a staggering amount to run. Somebody has to cover the bill for all those free answers, and OpenAI has been upfront about it all: ads help keep the free version free. Pay nothing, see a sponsor. It’s the oldest arrangement on the internet.
Which brings me to today.
ChatGPT started showing ads in the United States back in February. Today I receved an email inviting me to OpenAI’s self-serve tool. The big minimum spend was dropped. Now it’s possible for one person to build a campaign in an afternoon.
So I built one. I recorded my screen to share with you. It’s surprisingly simple.
A few things stood out, now that I’ve sat on the buying side of an AI ad.
The ads live apart from the answers. OpenAI built a wall between the sponsored message and the response the model gives you, and they say advertisers can’t reach across it to bend what ChatGPT tells you.
Good. On the open web, that same wall between the editorial and the advertising got awfully thin in a lot of places over the years. Whether this one holds is the question that decides the next ten years of AI.
The intent is sharper than anything that came before it. You don’t open ChatGPT to scroll. You open it with a problem you’re trying to solve, a decision you’re in the middle of making. That’s why the click costs four dollars and not four cents. An advertiser isn’t buying a glance anymore. They’re buying a seat next to you while you make up your mind. That’s worth more, and the price says so.
None of this is good or bad on its own. It’s the next turn of a wheel that’s been spinning since the first banner loaded in 1994. The ad layer always comes. It’s fun to get to the party early, while it’s awkward and a little expensive and nobody’s figured out the rules yet, or you can meet it later, after the price has been bid up by everyone who got there first. I’ve been early enough times to tell you early feels worse and pays better.
The walkthrough is in the video.
The click I used to collect now has my name on the invoice. Same transaction, turned around to look me in the eye. That’s how you know a medium has grown up. The ads show up. They always do. The only thing left to decide is which side of the click you want to be standing on when they arrive.
