It was only a matter of time. Ads could soon take over chatbots as tech companies look for new ways to generate revenue from AI.
At the moment, most chatbot services primarily rely on subscriptions to make money. OpenAI’s ChatGPT plus costs $20 a month, while the Google One AI Premium Plan will run you $19.99 a month.
Since most people aren’t willing to shell out that kind of money to use advanced versions of these chatbots, AI services will need to find other ways to monetize this tech. Ads could be the solution.
One startup is already showing how this could work. Adzedek calls itself an AI chatbot advertising marketplace. Essentially, it lets brands run sponsored ads in the responses of custom chatbots available in the OpenAI store and on apps that use OpenAI software.
The company recently published a video demo of its service. The video showed a Nike ad being tacked on to the end of a response from a “Basketball Expert” chatbot about the greatest NBA players of all time.
Adzedek uses a pay-per-click model allowing chatbot creators to keep 75% of ad revenue. It told Axios that it has displayed ads over one million times through its system.
Here is how other major chatbot players are currently handling ads.
💻 Microsoft
Microsoft is a leader on this front. The tech giant has allowed various advertisers including hotels, credit cards, and car companies to run ads on its AI-powered assistant Copilot — formerly known as Bing Chat — since last February.
And late last year, the company introduced AI-specific ad experiences such as “compare & decide ads.” These new ad models use AI to collect relevant data of various products into comparison tables when users make queries about buying decisions.
🔎 Alphabet
Alphabet’s Gemini does not currently run ads, however, the Google parent is experimenting how ads could work on its various AI-powered services.
“SGE [Search Generative Experience] is creating new opportunities for us to improve commercial journeys for people by showing relevant ads alongside search results,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s January earnings call about its AI-powered web search tool.
🤖 OpenAI
OpenAI, the creator of the most prominent chatbot, ChatGPT, doesn’t currently make money from ads displayed in its chatbots. However, that could change at any moment. “Maybe they are just letting the smaller players experiment on their behalf,” Columbia University marketing professor Olivier Toubia told Axios. “It won’t be hard for them to monetize if and when they decide.”