ChatGPT ad monetization experiment

ChatGPT going ad-supported on the free / Go tiers is basically the first serious A/B test of if Google’s business model survive in a world where you don’t have a search box. In search, life is simple. One query. Clear intent. Ten blue links. You can auction attention and call it a day. In multi‑turn assistants, intent is smeared across the whole conversation. You might go from “explain RAG” to “help me debug this stack trace” to “also, which GPU should I buy” in one session. Where do you even put the ad in that mess? Here, ads are appended to answers, not ranked in a list. That is a very different game. You can’t just bump a sponsored result to position one and print money. OpenAI also says they will not optimize for “watch time”. So the question for all of us is: can this make real revenue without slowly nudging the model toward ad‑friendly, commercial questions? If it works, we get a template for how every assistant product can monetize. If it fails, we learn something uncomfortable. Maybe assistants are great UX but bad businesses, unless you quietly turn them back into search with extra steps.