OpenAI has started showing ads to South African users on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans, part of an expansion of ChatGPT ads to 26 more countries. Users here began receiving emails this week about an updated privacy policy explaining how the ads work. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education plans stay ad-free.

Our concern: South African businesses cannot buy ChatGPT ads yet, so the ads local users see will come from foreign companies.

Ads appear below ChatGPT's answers, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the response, and OpenAI says they do not influence what ChatGPT tells users. They are targeted using information that stays inside ChatGPT, such as ads someone has interacted with and the context of their chats. Depending on the country and a user's settings, the system can also draw on their wider ChatGPT history to reflect broader interests.

OpenAI says advertisers never see chats, chat history, memories or personal details, only overall results such as total views and clicks. Users can control ad personalisation in their settings. And accounts identified as belonging to under-18s, based on account age information and age prediction, do not see ads.

The business behind this has grown quickly. OpenAI began testing ads in the US in February, launched a self-service Ads Manager with no minimum spend in April, and by 31 August said ChatGPT ads had reached an annualised revenue run rate of $1-billion, about R16.5-billion, in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers.

That Ads Manager is not yet open to South African businesses. OpenAI says the ad-supported free tier helps keep ChatGPT available to its more than 1 billion weekly users.

MyBroadband's Hanno Labuschagne reported the rollout and confirmed the Ads Manager was not available to local businesses at the time of publication. OpenAI's announcement lists the 26 new countries. OpenAI's help page explains how users can manage their ad experience and personalisation settings.

OpenAI's own pitch to marketers is that people arrive at ChatGPT with clear goals, such as choosing software for a business or planning a renovation, so discovery, consideration and decision-making happen in one place.

This is a new kind of advertising space. A search ad appears next to a list of links. A ChatGPT ad appears next to an answer to a question someone has asked in their own words, often while deciding what to buy. That is valuable to advertisers, and it is why the business reached a R16.5-billion run rate so quickly.

For South African users, two practical points. If you use a free or Go account, your chats now help decide which ads you see, so check your ad settings, and if your team uses free accounts for work, those work conversations feed the targeting too, which is worth considering alongside the POPIA guidance on AI at work.

For South African businesses, the opportunity is coming but not here yet. Until the Ads Manager opens locally, foreign brands get the space to themselves. It is the opposite model to Happy Ads, where a merchant pays only for a sale. Here you will likely pay for attention at the moment someone is making up their mind.

You might also like our piece on OpenAI watermarking ChatGPT text in the EU, TikTok's AI shopping assistant, and Amazon's early Black Friday sale.

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