OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT Ads in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan on 23 September, taking the advertising product past 60 countries. It follows earlier Asia-Pacific launches in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India.
Advertisers can buy through OpenAI’s own ads team, through agency partners including dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP, or through self-service access in Ads Manager if they qualify. Ads are shown only to users on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscriptions stay ad-free. OpenAI frames the business as supporting free and low-cost access to ChatGPT.
This is a distribution announcement rather than a product one, and on its own it is fairly routine. What makes it worth noting is the shape of what is being assembled: agency relationships, a self-service buying tool and a steadily widening country list, built around a product whose output readers tend to treat as advice rather than as search results. The question of how clearly sponsored material is separated from model answers gets harder with every market added, and this announcement does not address it.