OpenAI Opens The Box; And BBC Opens Up To YouTube Ads – AdExchanger

Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 – 12:01 am OpenAI Gets Over Its Ad-bivalence Finally, the long-awaited day is almost here.  After years of hedging and will-they-won’t-they speculation regarding the launch of a ChatGPT ads model, OpenAI announced on Friday that it’s going to begin testing ads within its main AI chatbot for users in the US. The ads will only appear in ChatGPT’s free and Go tiers (the latter being its lowest-cost subscription option, introduced as an option for US customers the same day). Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, is adamant that paid ads won’t affect product recommendations that ChatGPT deems “objectively useful,” nor will users’ data and conversations be sold to advertisers, per the announcement . Simply put, OpenAI wants to assure users that “ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives [them].” There’s a lot of certainty about what the ad business won’t look like. But what, exactly, it will look like isn’t set in stone. (And we all know Sam Altman’s take on ads is famously inconsistent .) For now, ads will exist at the bottom of ChatGPT feed and be clearly identified and separate from the organic recommendation. And the first ads will be part
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