The news: OpenAI will bring its ads pilot to 31 European markets, including Spain, Germany, and France, the company announced Wednesday. On a company briefing call, enterprise CMO Colin Fleming also stated that OpenAI’s ad revenues have grown more than 25% since the beginning of August, according to Adweek.

That impressive growth obscures a less attractive number: Earlier this month, CFO Sarah Friar told investors the company’s ad business is approaching a $1 billion run rate.

Fleming also noted that ChatGPT now surpasses one billion weekly active users, and that 20% of these users show “commercial intent.” The international expansion aims to build on this momentum and was framed as evidence of OpenAI’s relatively new ads business gaining traction.

Zooming out: OpenAI has made several advancements to expand and legitimize its nascent ad capabilities.

• The company expanded the ads pilot from the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to markets including the UK and Japan in May.
• OpenAI partnered with several ad tech firms to legitimize its early offerings.
• It debuted an ads manager beta in April, with a layout similar to Google Ads.
• It also began sharing user data with marketers several months ago as part of a broader effort to develop its ad tech.

The problem: Market expansion and ad tech developments serve two purposes: One, to ensure OpenAI can achieve its massive revenue goals, and two, to prove that the company is consistently working on ironing out its growing pains.

• OpenAI estimates that it will reach $2.5 billion in ad revenues this year and surpass $100 billion by 2030. That goal is as unlikely as it is ambitious: We estimate the entire US chatbot ad market to be just $5.41 billion by 2030. Expanding into new markets is essential if OpenAI wants to get anywhere near that figure.