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OpenAI opens ChatGPT Ads to India, with self-serve access eight days out

Sponsored slots go live this week for logged-in Free and Go users; Ads Manager for any business opens September 4 at ₹725/day.

By Iris Holloway·Tools & frameworks·

OpenAI switched on ChatGPT Ads in India on Thursday, seeding the market through WPP and Omnicom with more than 50 brands going live this week, and setting September 4 as the date any business can open the self-serve Ads Manager at a floor of ₹725 per day, roughly $7.60. That’s eight days from launch to open inventory.

The staging matters. Sponsored slots surface only for logged-in Free and Go users; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education remain ad-free. Free is the mass surface, Go is the ₹399/month rung, and together they cover the bulk of the 330 million unique monthly Indian users OpenAI counted in May 2026, up from 297 million in December. Weekly actives in India have doubled year-on-year, part of the global base that crossed 1 billion earlier this month. India is now OpenAI’s second-largest market, and the first outside the US to get a self-serve buying surface after last week’s expansion into 31 European countries.

The economics behind the push are legible in the filings the Wall Street Journal surfaced from OpenAI’s confidential June IPO paperwork: $6.7 billion in June-quarter revenue against a $12.3 billion operating loss, up from $5.7 billion and $9.3 billion the quarter before. Revenue is scaling. Losses are scaling faster. The US ads pilot, launched in February, crossed $100 million in annualised revenue within six weeks, which is why the international rollout is moving on a compressed clock.

Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s vice-president and head of global ads solutions, framed the pitch narrowly: “With ChatGPT Ads, businesses of every size can introduce themselves at relevant, high-context moments when decisions are beginning to take shape.”

What’s being sold, then, is intent capture at the point of query, priced low enough for a founder without a media buyer to test it. Google spent two decades building that market. OpenAI is trying to enter it in eight days.

Sources