In a two-part interview published by Digiday on June 30, 2026, OpenAI’s global head of ads, David Dugan, laid out how fast the company is turning ChatGPT into an advertising business — and, tellingly, where publishers sit in the plan. In roughly 19 weeks, OpenAI has launched ads in seven markets, hired ad executives, struck holdco and ad-tech partnerships, built measurement tooling, shipped an ads manager, and moved its buying model from CPM to CPC to conversion-optimized bidding. Asked about sharing revenue with publishers, Dugan’s answer was blunt: it “hasn’t been a conversation that’s come up.”
01An “open platform” — for everyone except publishers
Dugan’s pitch is that OpenAI is deliberately not building a walled garden. “There’s two ways to build these platforms,” he said. “One: you try to control all those client-direct relationships… Or two: what we’ve done — embrace the agency holdcos, embrace technology partners, and do it together as an industry.” On measurement, he called third-party verification “a natural step, a natural evolution,” signaling openness to outside auditing that walled gardens have long resisted.
That openness is real — toward agencies, ad-tech vendors and measurement firms. It simply doesn’t extend to the publishers whose content trained and grounds the product. OpenAI separately posted engineering roles focused on new “ad formats,” suggesting the current search-style sponsored links are just the beginning, with its CRO noting that roughly one in five ChatGPT queries shows commercial intent.
02Why marketers should care
- A serious ad platform has been assembled in roughly 19 weeks. Seven markets, ad executives hired, holdco and ad-tech partnerships struck, measurement built. That pace is an opportunity and a caution: the inventory is new, and so is everything you would normally use to judge it.
- There is no publisher revenue share, which makes the economics unlike anything else you buy. No supply-side cut means the cost structure is not comparable to open-web or even to walled-garden inventory. Your usual benchmarks will not tell you whether the price is good.
- The formats are moving down-funnel. From sponsored links toward new formats and conversion-optimised bidding, which means it is competing for your performance budget on performance terms — before there is much history to price it against.
03What marketers should do
04The bottom line
OpenAI is proving an ad platform can go from zero to seven markets in a single quarter — and it’s doing it as a self-styled open platform for agencies and ad tech, with publishers explicitly outside the revenue split. The “open industry” framing is worth holding them to: if OpenAI wants the ecosystem’s partners and its measurement standards, it should expect the ecosystem to demand its content be licensed and paid for, not quietly absorbed. Don’t wait to be invited into that conversation — force it.