OpenAI Internal Forecast: Plus Subscribers to Plummet 80% This Year, Advertising to Become Primary Revenue Stream by 2030

According to NetWatch Beating monitoring, an internal forecast from OpenAI indicates a drastic shift in the company's consumer subscription structure this year: Subscribers to the $8 per month ad-supported version of ChatGPT Go are expected to soar from approximately 3.1 million at the beginning of the year to 112 million, a 36x increase, while ChatGPT Plus subscribers at $20 per month are projected to plummet by 80% from around 45 million to about 9 million. The proportion of Go in the subscriber base is set to rise from 7% last year to 92% by the end of this year, while Plus is expected to drop from 92% to 7%, with the growth mainly driven by Plus users downgrading. The total consumer subscribers are forecasted to double to 122 million, reaching 306 million by 2030.

The influx of a large number of users into the lower-priced tier directly results in a halving of ARPU: the average monthly fee per subscriber is poised to drop from about $23 last year to less than $12 next year. OpenAI's strategy to counter this is through ad monetization. The company anticipates that ads will contribute approximately $2.4 billion in revenue this year, surging fourfold to nearly $11 billion next year, and reaching around $102 billion by 2030, becoming the company's largest revenue stream, accounting for about 36% of total revenue. Total revenue for this year is expected to still double to $30 billion, reaching $284 billion by 2030.

The challenge with this forecast lies in the timing discrepancy: the ad business only launched a pilot phase in February, generating around $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of March, but the full-year target is already set at $2.4 billion. At the same time, the company has already missed its internal revenue target for the first quarter. Go was launched in India in August last year and globally in January this year, with about 90% of weekly active users located outside the United States; the majority of Go's growth is expected to come from international markets.