It took Meta 15 years to build a $200B ad business.
OpenAI plans to get halfway there in 4. 🤯
Pinterest has been selling ads for 9 years.
They made $4.2B last year.
Snap has been at it for 10 years.
~$5.2B in 2025.
OpenAI plans to reach half of Meta's size by 2030.
Starting from basically zero!
Here's their roadmap, leaked to investors via Axios reporting:
2026: $2.5B
2027: $11B
2028: $25B
2029: $53B
2030: $100B
That's a growth curve with no precedent in the history of online advertising.
OpenAI is forecasting a 152% ad revenue CAGR over four years.
More than double TikTok's, the fastest-growing ad platform in history so far, which grew at an estimated 71% CAGR between 2021 and 2025.
But it gets even more interesting.
I did the math on revenue per user.
ChatGPT reported 900 million weekly active users as of February this year.
Ads only run on the Free and Go tiers, roughly 95% of users, ~850M.
That means OpenAI would earn around $3 per user in 2026.
They target 2.75B weekly users by 2030, so ~$40 per user.
For reference,Meta currently earns ~$59 per user.
So OpenAI's 2030 target requires 68% of Meta's current monetisation rate.
Ambitious is an understatement.
But not impossible, given the breakneck user growth ChatGPT has already experienced.
Plus, OpenAI ads also offer something other platforms don't.
The depth of data it collects about its users is unprecedented, and extremely valuable to advertisers.
Imagine your personal assistant and mentor selling your conversations to the highest bidder. That's essentially what's happening.
But the real question isn't whether $100B is achievable.
It's what happens to the rest of the ad industry when 2.75 billion people are asking an AI instead of scrolling a feed or typing a search query.
Sources: Axios, Reuters, TechCrunch and full-year earnings report.
Charts courtesy of Claude.
