OpenAI has plenty of advertisers for ChatGPT, but that has yet to translate into significant ad revenue.

The number of ChatGPT advertisers rose from about 20,000 at the end of August to roughly 60,000 in early October, according to Dan Salmon, a partner at New Street Research. Clicks cost about $5, compared with $30 to $50 for similar commercial software ads on Google. Even with that growth, OpenAI is still likely to miss the $2.4 billion in advertising revenue it had projected to investors for 2026, according to The Information.

That’s a useful snapshot of where ChatGPT advertising sits right now. OpenAI has lowered the barriers to trying it, expanded into more than 60 countries, added self-service buying, and started building the targeting and measurement tools performance marketers expect.

Marketers appear willing to experiment. The harder job is turning that experimentation into sustained budgets.

The early version of ChatGPT advertising looked more like a tightly controlled pilot.…