Data-driven performance advertising built the modern internet, warts and all. Data has become the most valuable resource in our economy, and the world’s most profitable companies have all organized around enclosing, extracting, processing, refining, and exploiting this new asset class.
Yesterday, OpenAI released its first performance advertising product. Marketers can now purchase “cost per click” advertising on ChatGPT, which means they can compare how money spent on OpenAI measures up to similar platforms like Google, Meta/Instagram, Apple, and Amazon, among many, many others. And if OpenAI’s offerings fail to compete, the company will have no choice but to modify its products to drive better performance.
Put simply, the race is on, and it’s one OpenAI can’t afford to lose. The data we create as we pour our hopes, fears, intimacies, questions, and personal narratives into the insatiable maw of an AI chatbot is being enclosed and exploited by the very same business model that bequeathed us Facebook.
It was inevitable that OpenAI would meet the Internet at its most profitable nexus. Now that it has, the incentive structures of performance advertising will forever imprint the fabric of our interactions with AI, and by extension, our understanding of the world.
Google’s introduction of cost-per-click a quarter century ago sparked a revolution in marketing that has shaped every corner of the digital world. Not only have the search, social, and mobile industries been built on the back of performance-based advertising units, so have the consumer products that shape our culture: Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and of course Google search. An obsession with performance birthed the data-driven “surveillance capitalism” now ubiquitous to nearly every business model on the Internet, from Uber to Apple (and yes, Apple collects and leverages truckloads of data to deliver both advertising and other services).
Given this, the question now becomes: How will the incentives inherent in data-driven advertising impact our experiences with AI? To presume nothing will change is to ignore history and the basic tenets of capitalism. OpenAI has declared ambitions to become a $100 billion performance advertising business in less than four years (it took Google almost two decades to reach that milestone). OpenAI also plans on becoming a trillion-dollar public company by the end of this year. Those kinds of expectations will inevitably force Sam Altman and his team to tailor their consumer products toward the collection and exploitation of their company’s most precious resource: The information we all disgorge into billions of chatbot windows each day.
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