From ADOTATWire & File: Netflix Promised "Formidable." Its Ad Sales Chief Is Expected to Leave.
OpenAI Says Trust Guides Its Ads. A Study Says Its Visits Earn 64% Less Than Google's.
By Pesach Lattin,
On Monday, OpenAI's head of monetization, Benji Shomair, said trust guides its ads business, and that partners sometimes ask for things OpenAI "just can't" do. The same week, ChatGPT's new "visual ads" started appearing in the pause while it generates an image you asked for, and OpenAI opened a self-serve Business Hub in beta so brands can see how people engage with them inside ChatGPT. The trust talk and the new ad slot arrived together.
Now the receipts. A working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze, still under review, looked at U.S. traffic and found a paid ChatGPT visit earned $0.89 per session, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit. That is about 64% less. Paid ChatGPT traffic converted at 0.37%, against 1.17% for Google. Among 87 U.S. sites buying both, 97% got less revenue per visit from ChatGPT. By the authors' math, a ChatGPT click is worth about 26 cents against a typical 72-cent search click.
Why it matters: buyers are being asked to fund a new channel on the strength of a story about the user. The paper suggests the user arrives less ready to buy. That does not make ChatGPT ads worthless, and one working paper is not the market. But it gives every media planner a number to put next to the pitch, and it lands while OpenAI is still adding formats. ADOTAT has already flagged the other half of the bargain: when AI tools rewrite your ad for you, the advertiser still carries the liability for copy nobody on its side read.
ADOTAT's line on the whole week fits here too: companies told you what they were, and their own paperwork disagreed. OpenAI calls the product trust. The early receipts call it about a third of a Google click. Before shifting search money, ask OpenAI for conversion data on your own campaigns, measured by someone you pick, and price the click accordingly. Trust is the pitch. The invoice is the test.
Expanded from the OpenAI item in ADOTAT's Nov. 13 Wire & File, which draws on trade coverage of OpenAI's announcements and remarks and on the Kaiser and Schulze working paper, which is still under review; the paper itself was not read for this item. The 64% figure is computed from the paper's $0.89 and $2.45 per-session numbers as ADOTAT reports them. The paper covers U.S. traffic and the 87 sites in its sample; it is not a measure of every advertiser's results. The note on advertiser liability for AI-rewritten ads comes from ADOTAT's Nov. 5 report, linked here. Disclosures from the original issue: Pesach Lattin has done contract work for Fox5 in Las Vegas and has said publicly that Charlie Collier should be replaced, founded and sold the ad game network Future Games Network, ran a competing ad network in the pop-under era, and carries an American Express business card; Jack Myers is a longtime ADOTAT reader; sponsor Troutman Amin had no say over editorial. ADOTAT is reader-supported, with no paid placement in editorial.