By OpenAI announced a series of ad tech partnerships and hiring moves over the past month. Here's what actually happened: the company is building the infrastructure to replace every vendor it just signed up.
The sequence tells you everything. On March 2, Criteo put out a press release announcing it was the "first advertising technology partner" in OpenAI's ChatGPT ad pilot. Days later, Digiday reported that OpenAI was hiring a monetization infrastructure engineer, engineering manager, product designer, senior manager for ad revenue accounting, and a trust and safety specialist dedicated to ads, all full-time, all in San Francisco, with compensation bands reaching $385,000. Then on March 23, Adweek reported that OpenAI had poached David Dugan, a decade-plus veteran of Meta's ads division, to serve as VP and head of global ads solutions.
You don't pay $385,000 for engineers and recruit Meta's ads leadership if you plan to let Criteo run the show.
The playbook everyone's pretending not to see
If this feels familiar, it should. Netflix partnered with Microsoft's ad platform in 2022 to launch its ad-supported tier, then spent the next three years building its own ad tech stack and pulling capabilities in-house. Walmart ran a similar play, leaning on DSP partnerships before consolidating its retail media infrastructure under Walmart Connect. The pattern is the same every time: partner to learn, hire to build, then cut the cord.
OpenAI is just doing it faster and being less coy about it. As Digiday noted, "companies don't build out an internal ads org, let alone pay up to $385,000 to do it, if they're planning to rely on outside vendors forever."
Meanwhile, Criteo's own press release called the ChatGPT integration "an exciting step forward in advancing advertising in an emerging AI experience." What Criteo didn't mention: the company is staring down a $75 million revenue headwind in 2026 after two major retail media clients reduced their scope, and its stock was trading near 52-week lows last month. Being OpenAI's first ad tech partner is the most compelling story Criteo can tell investors right now. The catch is that the better Criteo performs inside ChatGPT, the stronger the case OpenAI has for building that capability itself.
Follow the money
The numbers explain the urgency. OpenAI has topped $25 billion in annualized revenue as of late February, according to The Information. But approximately 95% of ChatGPT's 900 million-plus weekly active users don't pay for subscriptions. The company is expected to burn through roughly $15 billion in cash this year, up from $9 billion in 2025. Subscriptions alone will not close that gap.
Advertising is the most direct path to monetizing the other 95%. OpenAI launched ads on ChatGPT's free and Go tiers on February 9. Reuters reported on March 21 that the company will begin showing ads to all free and Go users in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Early pricing sits at roughly $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum spend, according to Adweek. Initial advertisers include Target, Ford, Adobe, Best Buy, AT&T, and Expedia.
That $60 CPM runs about three times what Meta charges for comparable placements. OpenAI can command that premium because Criteo's data shows users referred through LLM interactions convert at approximately 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels. High-intent audiences in a novel format with limited supply: that's the pricing equation every new ad platform dreams about.
OpenAI has also held early talks with The Trade Desk about selling ChatGPT inventory through programmatic channels, according to The Information. The Trade Desk's stock rallied more than 9% after hours on that report. The logic is straightforward: The Trade Desk operates the largest independent DSP, and a partnership would make ChatGPT inventory accessible through buying tools advertisers already use.
But here's the incentive problem nobody is discussing openly. The Trade Desk has spent a decade positioning itself as the open alternative to walled gardens. Helping OpenAI scale its ad business could accelerate the construction of exactly the kind of closed, proprietary platform The Trade Desk has built its identity against. As Wayvia CEO Anthony Ferry told Digiday, "the platform that owns the user relationship, the intent signal and the answer surface usually ends up with the most leverage."
The real endgame
The Dugan hire from Meta is the clearest signal of where this is headed. He's not joining to manage vendor relationships. Adweek reported he'll report directly to COO Brad Lightcap. This follows the earlier appointment of Fidji Simo, the former Facebook executive who now leads OpenAI's product and business teams as CEO of applications. Two senior Meta and Facebook veterans now run OpenAI's commercial strategy. That tells you the model they're replicating: Meta's ads playbook, applied to a company with comparable user scale.
Karsten Weide, principal and chief analyst at W Media Research, told Digiday that "OpenAI will choose to build their own ad stack because only that way they will be able to work with a platform that enables the 'new kind of advertising' that they envision, based on conversations with customers rather than other targeting data." He added that developing an ad tech stack "takes forever," which is why the vendor partnerships exist: "OpenAI desperately needs revenue, that's why they will partner with one or more DSPs. They will split the revenue and buy time to market that way."
That's the real story. Criteo and The Trade Desk aren't partners. They're training wheels. And they know it.
What comes next
The privacy question is the wild card. OpenAI's user base has already shown it will walk when trust breaks down. The backlash over OpenAI's Pentagon deal drove a visible wave of users to Anthropic's Claude. Early ad appearances in ChatGPT triggered similar reactions. Will Holtz, VP of strategy at Precient AI, told Digiday that OpenAI recognizes the risk and is "more likely to pull back if they feel it is going to hurt" consumer trust.
Owning the ad stack gives OpenAI more control over that equation than outsourcing it ever could. It also gives them all the margin. No rev-share with Criteo, no programmatic fees to The Trade Desk, no dependency on anyone else's measurement infrastructure.
If OpenAI's $17 billion consumer revenue projection holds, and advertising becomes the primary engine for the 95% of users who don't pay, we're watching the fastest construction of a walled garden ad platform since Facebook scaled its news feed ads in the early 2010s. The vendors helping OpenAI get there should probably read the fine print on those partnership agreements.
Zach El-Amin covers ad tech for The Daily Vibe.
