Your free AI now has advertisers — what that changes, and what your business should actually be paying for

Earlier this year OpenAI said ChatGPT had passed 900 million weekly users, and that more than 50 million people paid for a consumer subscription. The distance between those two numbers is the whole story of the past few weeks.

Advertising arrived in ChatGPT in the United States on 9 February. Canada, Australia and New Zealand followed in March, and on 11 August it reached the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. On 24 August it began serving in 31 European markets, which OpenAI calls its largest expansion to date. Jamaica is not in the rollout, and a local user should not be seeing ads today.

That is worth knowing before it arrives rather than after, because the tool a great many businesses here rely on for drafting, summarising and thinking out loud is turning into an advertising business, and the terms are already published.