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ChatGPT Ads Hit One Billion · Leading Local Insights

• 0:34
  Celine Matthiessen: Welcome back to the BIA Advisory Services Leading Local Podcast.
• 0:37
  Celine Matthiessen: I'm Celine Matizen, VP of Insights and Analysis, and I'm here with my colleague Mike Boland.
• 0:42
  Celine Matthiessen: If you caught our last episode, I think Mike, it was back in May, covering OpenAI's strategic entry into the advertising market with ChatGPT.
• 0:51
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, we're following up with some big updates.
• 0:54
  Celine Matthiessen: OpenAI just hit a major milestone with its ad business, and there's news on international expansion.
• 0:59
  Celine Matthiessen: We'll connect these latest developments with what we discussed last time and break down what it all means for the industry.
• 1:05
  Celine Matthiessen: Hey, good afternoon, Mike.
• 1:07
  Mike Boland: Hi, Celine.
• 1:08
  Mike Boland: Good to be with you.
• 1:09
  Celine Matthiessen: Great.
• 1:10
  Celine Matthiessen: So let's just jump right in.
• 1:11
  Celine Matthiessen: OpenAI just announced that its ad business has reached a billion annualized revenue rate.
• 1:17
  Celine Matthiessen: Wow.
• 1:17
  Celine Matthiessen: A staggering number for a business that's only been alive for about 200 days.
• 1:21
  Celine Matthiessen: So what stands out to you in this update?
• 1:24
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 1:25
  Mike Boland: And you're right, Celine.
• 1:26
  Mike Boland: This is a good follow-up to that first podcast we did to sort of introduce what they were doing.
• 1:31
  Mike Boland: And we we did a lot of speculation on that one.
• 1:34
  Mike Boland: So now this is kind of full circle, and like, you know, we can see what actually happened, or at least until now.
• 1:37
  Mike Boland: So anyway, to answer your question, I think the stand the thing that stands out is like the sheer number.
• 1:43
  Mike Boland: I think prior to this, it was all guesswork, right?
• 1:45
  Mike Boland: Analysts like us have to sort of triangulate and speculate.
• 1:48
  Mike Boland: And this gives us a more concrete and reliable first party figure.
• 1:53
  Mike Boland: So that makes our lives easier for one thing.
• 1:55
  Mike Boland: But I think more importantly, all those signals we were tracking were sort of all over the map about the sort of anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of different campaigns.
• 2:07
  Mike Boland: I talked to a lot of like search agencies and what they're seeing.
• 2:10
  Mike Boland: We can get into that in a minute.
• 2:12
  Mike Boland: Um, but but I think to put that number into perspective, like if we look at a billion and as a run rate, like what does that mean?
• 2:19
  Mike Boland: So, first of all, it's a run rate.
• 2:20
  Mike Boland: I think we all know what a run rate is, but just to sort of pull on that thread, um, it it's it's not a billion in revenue, you know, now or even in in in calendar year 2026, but rather the annualized figure based on the revenue they're seeing now.
• 2:34
  Mike Boland: So if the fiscal calendar ran from now until 12 months from now and their current pace sustains, they're looking at a billion in revenue.
• 2:43
  Mike Boland: So it's that sort of hypothetical exercise, but it's based on today's reality.
• 2:47
  Mike Boland: So it's valid.
• 2:48
  Mike Boland: And I think to put that into perspective, that like 1 billion figure, I think we all know what a billion is, it's you know, a thousand million.
• 2:55
  Mike Boland: But in this context, it's interesting.
• 2:58
  Mike Boland: So if we look at the top players in ad revenue, um, so so like if we look at the duopoly, right?
• 3:04
  Mike Boland: Google and meta.
• 3:05
  Mike Boland: Google has about 300 billion in in annual ad revenue.
• 3:09
  Mike Boland: Meta's at about 200 billion, um, and then it sort of fragments from there.
• 3:14
  Mike Boland: Amazon's in third place with about 70 billion.
• 3:17
  Mike Boland: Um, so so 1 billion is small in those terms, but I think the key point is what you said, Celine, which is that they were able to do this in 200 days.
• 3:26
  Mike Boland: So I think that's the key part, the momentum and the headroom, and they're sort of matching the momentum they're seeing on the user side with just like usage growth exploding across the board in AI, not just not just OpenAI and ChatGPT.
• 3:40
  Mike Boland: Um, so I think to answer your question, that's what stands out.
• 3:43
  Mike Boland: It's the fact that they're they've been able to do this so quickly.
• 3:47
  Mike Boland: And I think that that makes it really potentially disruptive to the ad ecosystem as we know it.
• 3:52
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, they definitely put a spotlight on them for the big three to say, hey, look what we're doing.
• 3:58
  unknown: Right?
• 3:59
  Mike Boland: Yep.
• 3:59
  Mike Boland: They put them on notice.
• 4:01
  Celine Matthiessen: The you know, this there was a CNBC piece that highlighted uh ChatGPT ads and announced now, you know, speaking of run rate, um, they're available in over 40 countries with um self-service rolling out in India, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa.
• 4:15
  Celine Matthiessen: So how significant is this global expansion?
• 4:19
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I think it is, but but it's sort of just table stakes, right?
• 4:22
  Mike Boland: Like you limit your addressable market without global reach because you're not applicable to like a wide swath of Fortune 500 companies that that operate on a global scale.
• 4:32
  Mike Boland: So I think this was a logical part of their evolution.
• 4:35
  Mike Boland: They were really in sort of beta testing and piloting in a lot of ways, rolling it out slowly.
• 4:40
  Mike Boland: So I think this is a logical jump.
• 4:42
  Mike Boland: But I think that um, you know, in in that light, I think it's something that will accelerate their path to 2 billion, 10 billion, so on.
• 4:53
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 4:53
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 4:54
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, excuse me, open AI claims it's as are clearly labeled, doesn't influence answers, and that advertisers can can't access private conversations.
• 5:05
  Celine Matthiessen: Uh how poor important is this for advertisers and for users?
• 5:10
  Mike Boland: Yeah, well, it's it's critical for something that a technology that inherently has so many trust issues.
• 5:15
  Mike Boland: So, like anything advertising based um is gonna have some sort of trust headwinds, right?
• 5:23
  Mike Boland: Um, in the sort of era of privacy.
• 5:25
  Mike Boland: I think open AI or anyone in AI is sort of doubly um at risk of of of a privacy backlash because it's already a technology that sort of has some sort of some bad juju and you know it's political capital and all of that.
• 5:42
  Mike Boland: Um, but I think that it's important too.
• 5:45
  Mike Boland: I like your question because let's let's like step back and contextualize these ads themselves, right?
• 5:51
  Mike Boland: You know, what are they?
• 5:53
  Mike Boland: While we're at it, what what's the history of the program?
• 5:55
  Mike Boland: Um and that's some of the stuff we covered in that previous episode, as you noted, but let's sort of like briefly level set on some of those for those unfamiliar and sort of get everyone up to speed.
• 6:07
  Mike Boland: So if we if we sort of rewind, start at the beginning, um, OpenAI made the the surprising and the unsurprising move.
• 6:14
  Mike Boland: I think that's the way I put it in our last podcast, um, back at the beginning of the year to to enter this world of advert ad monetization.
• 6:21
  Mike Boland: And I say unsurprising because it's it's sort of a logical monetization path for something that runs parallel to search in a lot of ways, and that it's a high-intent medium.
• 6:30
  Mike Boland: You know, ad support's very logical there.
• 6:32
  Mike Boland: But it was surprising because Sam Altman had previously been quite public about the sort of the evils of ad support when it comes to sort of maintaining trust and objectivity of a search engine, or in this case, an AI engine.
• 6:46
  Mike Boland: And a lot of those comments we take with a grain of salt because they were sort of like, you know, jabs at at Google.
• 6:52
  Mike Boland: Um, but but anyway, now, despite what he said, you know, whether it was about Google or not, and they're now jumping into it.
• 6:58
  Mike Boland: And I and I think that an important question to ask is why, like why are they doing this?
• 7:03
  Mike Boland: Because I think that helps triangulate the the what and and what comes next, um, and some of your your privacy stuff that you asked about.
• 7:09
  Mike Boland: Um and I think the biggest reason is that, you know, it's it's facing a looming IPO that everyone's talking about, that that's sort of around the corner.
• 7:17
  Mike Boland: At the same time, anthropic continues to take share of its core business and pull ahead in the enterprise.
• 7:24
  Mike Boland: So I think this is just really a revenue diversification play.
• 7:27
  Mike Boland: So that covers the why.
• 7:29
  Mike Boland: As for the what, um, I think that it's important to point out the ad program roll down.
• 7:34
  Mike Boland: We talked about this last time, but again, to level set, it had its share of growing pains.
• 7:38
  Mike Boland: You know, the initial set of options were limited, the CPMs were high, they were high as $60.
• 7:43
  Mike Boland: There was a $200,000 campaign minimum.
• 7:47
  Mike Boland: There, there weren't any performance-based options, right?
• 7:50
  Mike Boland: Which you'd expect for a search-like ad format.
• 7:53
  Mike Boland: Um, but then since then, it's it's really eased up on a lot of those restrictions, lowered the CPMs, lowered the spending floor, um, has its CPC options now, and and more importantly, it's partnered with several third-party ad managers, which I think we can get into in a little while.
• 8:08
  Mike Boland: Um, you know, ad managers in the ad tech realm that sort of bring Chat GPT advertising in to a familiar environment where a lot of brand marketers and local businesses will sort of manage their campaigns.
• 8:22
  Mike Boland: So it so it gave them the sort of one-stop shop.
• 8:25
  Mike Boland: So I think with all those concessions, it's doing a lot better.
• 8:29
  Mike Boland: Um, and this comes back to the billion figure because now we know the dollar value of those outcomes.
• 8:35
  Mike Boland: Um, but a lot more to say about the sort of ad units and what they look like and all that kind of stuff.
• 8:40
  Mike Boland: But I'll I'll pause there in terms of just like sort of some of the backdrop for all of this.
• 8:45
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, well, I I feel like again, the consumer side of it, I think you know, they're very smart because they've seen from the history with Google and Facebook, with Meta, um, the consumer backlash for privacy.
• 8:55
  Celine Matthiessen: Totally.
• 8:56
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, I mean, I was on ChatGPT today and I got served, I got served an ad with like a lot of warning labels around it, like a cigarette, like cigarette carton.
• 9:04
  Celine Matthiessen: We don't endorse this.
• 9:06
  Celine Matthiessen: But you know, I feel like in some ways, when at least for me from a user perspective, I'm using Chat GPT to um solve problems, look at things differently, but I'm communicating like it's you.
• 9:18
  Celine Matthiessen: And like if you all of a sudden I asked you a question, like, hey Mike, it's raining outside, should I get an umbrella?
• 9:22
  Celine Matthiessen: Should I wear an umbrella, get an umbrella, or what do you think?
• 9:26
  Celine Matthiessen: And you came back and said, Oh yeah.
• 9:28
  Celine Matthiessen: And by the way, here's one you can purchase on Amazon.
• 9:31
  Celine Matthiessen: You know, like it like the authenticity of that is uh something that they're gonna be able to do.
• 9:35
  Mike Boland: Yeah, you start to question it.
• 9:37
  Mike Boland: Like we're I think our brains are very smart to know where we're being sold to.
• 9:40
  Mike Boland: And it's sort of that moment where you're like, wait a minute.
• 9:43
  Mike Boland: But I think also on that point of privacy, it's interesting because one of Chat GPT's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness when it comes to privacy.
• 9:52
  Mike Boland: So one of the things that ChatGPT, not the ad program, but just the inherent product, prides itself in is having a memory, right?
• 10:00
  Mike Boland: So it will answer questions within the context of your historical questions if you're signed in and what it knows about you.
• 10:08
  Mike Boland: It knows that, like, you know, you're a craft beer connoisseur or you live in suburban Cleveland and you have two kids and you have a dog, and it will sort of like answer in that way.
• 10:17
  Mike Boland: And sometimes you get those answers back with that level of specificity, specificity, excuse me, that like it can be like, oh, cool, you know, that saves me some time.
• 10:27
  Mike Boland: It knows me.
• 10:28
  Mike Boland: But it's also for some people that can be sort of creepy.
• 10:31
  Mike Boland: So again, it's sort of a double-edged sword there with the privacy stuff.
• 10:34
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, also dangerous.
• 10:35
  Celine Matthiessen: This is really funny.
• 10:36
  Celine Matthiessen: I read an article this morning that a bunch of hikers uh used, I don't know if it was chat, it wasn't chat, it was some AI program, some AI agent, I should say it's not a program, AI agent, um, to do a hike and they um they fouled it for you know, if they followed what AI suggested, ended up having to be rescued.
• 10:56
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 10:57
  Celine Matthiessen: So I mean, things like that.
• 10:58
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, I, you know, things like that happened, but that just reminded me that I'm like, oh, okay.
• 11:02
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 11:02
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, so speaking of Apple Maps.
• 11:03
  Mike Boland: You know what that reminds me of before you go on?
• 11:05
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 11:05
  Mike Boland: Um, remember when Google, not Google Maps, Apple Maps first came up.
• 11:09
  Celine Matthiessen: Oh, yeah.
• 11:10
  Mike Boland: And it was, it was a typical Apple move.
• 11:12
  Mike Boland: Like it was all about like they had the best UX and elegant design and everything, but they didn't realize out of the bat that, like, oh, if you're gonna run a mapping product, it just can't be about just like, you know, uh an elegant user experience.
• 11:25
  Mike Boland: Like, you gotta have all the data, you gotta know what you're doing.
• 11:27
  Mike Boland: And and I think we called it at the time Map Gate.
• 11:29
  Mike Boland: Remember Map Gate?
• 11:30
  Mike Boland: Oh, yes.
• 11:30
  Mike Boland: And it was just so awful out of the gate.
• 11:32
  Mike Boland: And to your point about like sending hikers towards their you know, potential demise, you know, Apple Maps was like, I don't think it ever ended up being like fate fate, like fatalities, but they were doing things like leaving people off cliffs, and like, of course, that you know, before someone actually drove off the cliff, they're you know, they realized that this was wrong, but it was sending people into dangerous situations.
• 11:55
  Mike Boland: And it reminds me of that, and that's that's early days of of new products.
• 11:58
  Mike Boland: And it's also the interesting side note there is kind of the hubris.
• 12:01
  Mike Boland: Like, we might get into this in a little while in terms of like OpenAI, they have so much momentum, they're the hot company, and they think, oh, we're just gonna launch an ad program and then go up against Google that's been doing it for like 30 years, right?
• 12:12
  Mike Boland: And and I think that I want to get into this in a little while, but some of their actual execution and performance and ad targeting is need some work.
• 12:19
  Mike Boland: Um, but anyway, it's that sort of early stage hubris that like what like what Apple did with Apple Maps.
• 12:24
  Mike Boland: We're Apple, of course we can do this.
• 12:25
  Mike Boland: And it's like, well, it's a little harder than we thought.
• 12:28
  Celine Matthiessen: Anyway, yeah, well, and product-wise too, OpenAI started with sponsored rec sponsored recommendation boxes, you know, contextual links and product carousels uh for their first ad formats.
• 12:40
  Celine Matthiessen: I I've seen a bunch of them.
• 12:41
  Celine Matthiessen: And I can tell you the uh product carousels really help speed up my uh yeah.
• 12:46
  Celine Matthiessen: But what do you what do you think is coming next?
• 12:48
  Celine Matthiessen: I mean, I'm guessing maybe video, right?
• 12:50
  Celine Matthiessen: What do you think?
• 12:51
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on what's coming next, but I'm glad you just uh touched on like the formats they have now.
• 12:56
  Mike Boland: In the spirit of I keep saying we're in a level set, even though we went over this in the last podcast.
• 13:00
  Mike Boland: Let's briefly talk about what they have now, like from the user perspective.
• 13:05
  Mike Boland: I don't know if everyone's familiar with this.
• 13:06
  Mike Boland: So just a quick level set.
• 13:08
  Mike Boland: There are three main ad units.
• 13:09
  Mike Boland: You mentioned one of them, the the carousel.
• 13:11
  Mike Boland: So the first one is like a sponsored recommendation box.
• 13:14
  Mike Boland: And this is the closest to like a Google ad, what you might expect in a Google ad.
• 13:19
  Mike Boland: It's a it's an off-color shaded box in the result set or the question that's being answered that will have some sort of ad copy.
• 13:26
  Mike Boland: And it's, you know, obviously going to be contextually irrelevant to what you searched for.
• 13:30
  Mike Boland: The second one is links.
• 13:32
  Mike Boland: So, as you know, and most people know listening, there are citations currently in a lot of the answers.
• 13:38
  Mike Boland: I think because of AI's trust issues, it's it always wants to show its source, show, you know, show your work.
• 13:44
  Mike Boland: Like it's like uh seventh grade, you know, algebra, show your work.
• 13:48
  Mike Boland: Um, it's doing that.
• 13:49
  Mike Boland: Google's doing it too.
• 13:50
  Mike Boland: It's citations, right?
• 13:51
  Mike Boland: Like it's like, here's where we got this, just so you know we're not making it up.
• 13:54
  Mike Boland: So those citations are now also going to be that that ad inventory is gonna be fodder for sponsored links.
• 14:02
  Mike Boland: Um, and they're gonna be well differentiated in terms of the UX and what they look like.
• 14:07
  Mike Boland: I think they're gonna be different colors.
• 14:08
  Mike Boland: So that's the second one.
• 14:09
  Mike Boland: First one, sponsored ad, second one, sponsored links.
• 14:12
  Mike Boland: The third one you mentioned, which is um like a product carousel.
• 14:16
  Mike Boland: And that's really just a lot like Google Shopping, image-based ad units that that it's like a sort of slider that you can flip through in terms of um available products.
• 14:24
  Mike Boland: So that's what they have now.
• 14:26
  Mike Boland: Um to get to your question about what's coming next, I think a few things.
• 14:31
  Mike Boland: Video for sure.
• 14:32
  Mike Boland: I think that was a that was a good call.
• 14:34
  Mike Boland: Um, but I would delineate the answer into two things: more formats and better targeting.
• 14:39
  Mike Boland: So the formats, I think we're gonna see more things that are transactional and action-oriented, more buttons to buy or book, that kind of thing.
• 14:46
  Mike Boland: That follows an evolution of, you know, Google, Google has done that, right?
• 14:49
  Mike Boland: It leads to zero-click search where you're spending more time just within the Google, you know, answer.
• 14:54
  Mike Boland: And the their sort of excuse for doing that is it's better for the user experience, you know, less clicks.
• 15:00
  Mike Boland: Uh, but I think really what they're going for is to be positioned as like owning the entire funnel.
• 15:06
  Mike Boland: It all happens under their roof.
• 15:07
  Mike Boland: They can better monetize the whole thing with affiliate revenue and just they if they own the whole funnel, obviously.
• 15:13
  Mike Boland: So, so so more formats with calls to action.
• 15:16
  Mike Boland: That's one thing.
• 15:17
  Mike Boland: And I think video is another one, to your point.
• 15:19
  Mike Boland: And then that second category of better targeting, this gets to what I was alluding to earlier.
• 15:25
  Mike Boland: And backing up a bit, there's some evidence that these ads, despite this big revenue milestone we're we're looking at today, um, they don't convert that well.
• 15:33
  Mike Boland: I've talked to a few search marketing agencies that are running campaigns on ChatGPT, and they tell me that the conversion rates are actually terrible.
• 15:41
  Mike Boland: The traffic's low quality, it bounces quickly, it doesn't convert, um, which is surprising because again, this is such a high intent medium.
• 15:50
  Mike Boland: You'd think you you'd end up with the right quality users looking to buy something.
• 15:54
  Mike Boland: But I think that what's falling down there is it's a function of OpenAI's sort of ad targeting algorithms.
• 16:01
  Mike Boland: You know, we're just 200 days in.
• 16:03
  Mike Boland: Um, and I think that they're just not gonna be naturally, this is what you would expect, not as sophisticated and performant as the likes of Google that's been perfecting those mechanisms for like 30 years.
• 16:14
  Mike Boland: So I think that's the second thing I think is gonna get a lot better or change to answer your question, which is the back-end stuff, the targeting capabilities, the refining, get giving advertisers better, more quality, higher converting traffic.
• 16:28
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, great.
• 16:29
  Celine Matthiessen: I yeah, I think they have a long way to go with that for sure.
• 16:31
  Celine Matthiessen: And you know, speaking of that, so they've jumped into self-service access internationally.
• 16:35
  Celine Matthiessen: And, you know, what does that look like for local advertisers?
• 16:38
  Celine Matthiessen: Is there real potential for small businesses?
• 16:41
  Celine Matthiessen: Even I'm gonna kind of also throw in they dropped their minimums, which of uh 200, 200k spend and 60 CPMs.
• 16:48
  Celine Matthiessen: So that's an indication that they're moving downstream into local and to small businesses.
• 16:52
  Celine Matthiessen: So, what do you think the future, or what can you predict, or what do you think is gonna happen uh there?
• 16:56
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I think you're you're right on there.
• 16:58
  Mike Boland: One of the things that is going to open this up and lower the barriers to adoption is going to be yeah, lowering that like cost-prohibited caps that they had for a lot of local businesses.
• 17:09
  Mike Boland: So that's number one.
• 17:11
  Mike Boland: Um I think that there are, there's another thing too.
• 17:15
  Mike Boland: I I think I mentioned this earlier, but I'll I'll expand on it.
• 17:18
  Mike Boland: There are several third-party ad managers that are starting to integrate ChatGPT ads.
• 17:23
  Mike Boland: So it sort of meets marketers where they live.
• 17:26
  Mike Boland: I think that's gonna be a big move because right now, the one of the barriers in getting into it is this sort of intimidation of learning a new tool, having to go start a new account.
• 17:36
  Mike Boland: And if it's sort of integrated into sort of the third-party ad tech sort of dashboard or ad manager you're already using, um, I think that's gonna be that's gonna be key to sort of lowering some of those barriers.
• 17:50
  Mike Boland: Um, one example there is there's a company called AdBridge that offers a product where it'll sort of take your Google AdWords campaign and essentially convert it into a chat GPT ad campaign.
• 18:02
  Mike Boland: So that's all of your like your campaign goals, your your targeted keywords, your spend limit, and it'll sort of translate that into Chat GPT sort of corresponding functions.
• 18:13
  Mike Boland: So I think we're gonna start to see a lot more of that as a the sort of ad tech ecosystem opportunistically jumps on this.
• 18:21
  Mike Boland: And I think the result of that self-interested sort of land grab is gonna be more optionality, lowered barriers, and frankly, lowered cost because we're talking about bid marketplaces here.
• 18:34
  Mike Boland: Um and actually, as more people flood in, it could bid up the cost in certain areas.
• 18:39
  Mike Boland: But um, but I think that all of those things in a net basis is gonna lower the barriers and and get more SMBs sort of into the mix here.
• 18:48
  Mike Boland: And not just SMBs, I say SMBs.
• 18:50
  Mike Boland: We we should like mid-level.
• 18:53
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 18:53
  Mike Boland: Yeah, mid-level two, low local businesses, right?
• 18:55
  Mike Boland: I mean, that's everything from mom and pops to like the car dealership, um, and you know, the multi-location franchises.
• 19:03
  Mike Boland: Yeah, totally.
• 19:04
  Mike Boland: All of them.
• 19:05
  Celine Matthiessen: So and it also too, like in some ways for brands like state, like speaking of like franchise and local, like State Farm, where they have you know, national buys.
• 19:13
  Celine Matthiessen: Local agents.
• 19:14
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 19:15
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, they're local agent buys then would start it.
• 19:17
  Mike Boland: Yeah, they might have co-op dollars and some some support, some marketing support from the mothership.
• 19:23
  Mike Boland: Um, absolutely.
• 19:25
  Celine Matthiessen: Right.
• 19:25
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah.
• 19:25
  Celine Matthiessen: Well, I think the third party to the um you know, Chat GBT partnering to get um, you know, customers to use to partner with, you know, retailers to get on their retail media networks or on their sites to be used, right?
• 19:39
  Celine Matthiessen: That's where they're gonna really um get headway and get eyes because the other thing they have to do is get the get the local eyes in local places for for um and that's always been a challenge as we know in local is coming up with the local traffic and audiences.
• 19:54
  Celine Matthiessen: Absolutely.
• 19:55
  Celine Matthiessen: So so well, okay.
• 19:57
  Celine Matthiessen: So lastly, I think we've we've we've done, you know, you've done a great job and you've answered all my questions.
• 20:02
  Celine Matthiessen: The what's the future?
• 20:03
  Celine Matthiessen: What what's the other new revenue milestone?
• 20:06
  Celine Matthiessen: Or what do you think their revenue milestone is going to be in uh with the continued global rollout and all the enhancements for their business?
• 20:12
  Celine Matthiessen: What do you think?
• 20:13
  Mike Boland: Yeah, like the global thing you mentioned, the other moves they're making, I think that they'll accelerate the revenue growth, like 200 days to a billion.
• 20:21
  Mike Boland: Let's see how long it takes them to get to 2 billion and if that's less than 200 days.
• 20:27
  Celine Matthiessen: Um I think they're seeing they announced announced yet where if they're gonna IPO or when?
• 20:31
  Mike Boland: Uh we I don't think we know that date yet, but everyone's talking about it as if it's sort of around the corner.
• 20:36
  Mike Boland: So we'll see.
• 20:37
  Mike Boland: I think there's a lot of pressure for them to do that, but they're also waiting for the right moment because they do have like they have to take this story on the road, all that typical IPO roadshow stuff.
• 20:45
  Mike Boland: And I think they want to make sure they're in the strongest position to do so.
• 20:49
  Mike Boland: So I think they were waiting for a few milestones like this that sort of bolsters that narrative.
• 20:54
  Mike Boland: Um, and they're also rolling out things that really compete more aggressively with anthropic in the enterprise where anthropic has seen the most gains.
• 21:04
  Mike Boland: So I think they want to like go into that roadshow from the strongest possible position.
• 21:08
  Mike Boland: So I think they're sort of, you know, angling themselves and and then we'll we'll see that.
• 21:13
  Mike Boland: I think probably pretty sometime soon.
• 21:15
  Celine Matthiessen: Oh, you think sometime sooner or do you think like maybe 20 like 2027, like first quarter 2027?
• 21:19
  Mike Boland: Yeah, I I think when I say sometime soon, I don't mean days.
• 21:23
  Mike Boland: It's probably in the next few quarters.
• 21:24
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 21:25
  Celine Matthiessen: Okay, yeah.
• 21:25
  Celine Matthiessen: That's what I was gonna say.
• 21:27
  Mike Boland: They need some time to get some more um yeah, some more wind behind their sails.
• 21:31
  Celine Matthiessen: Yeah, or stars or whatever.
• 21:32
  Mike Boland: Yeah.
• 21:33
  Mike Boland: Well, I mean, it's the kids' stuff, right?
• 21:37
  Celine Matthiessen: School.
• 21:37
  Celine Matthiessen: Um Mike, that was a great breakdown.
• 21:39
  Celine Matthiessen: And thank you so much for being here today and sharing your thoughts and insights as always.
• 21:44
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, looking forward to what are we gonna do next, right?
• 21:46
  Celine Matthiessen: We've got another one that we might be talking about, maybe some Apple.
• 21:50
  Mike Boland: Yeah, so maybe that's a good idea.
• 21:52
  Mike Boland: T T's our next one.
• 21:53
  Mike Boland: We've been kind of throwing around the idea about doing an upcoming episode that looks at Apple's latest move as it relates to, you know, our bread and butter here, which is of course local advertising, Apple Maps.
• 22:05
  Mike Boland: And we talked about maps earlier, of course, but this is in a different light.
• 22:08
  Mike Boland: They, for the first time in, I think Maps came out in what, like around the 2010 timeframe, so 15 years or so, uh, for the first time are rolling out ads in maps.
• 22:18
  Mike Boland: Google Maps has been doing this forever, and now Apple Maps will have ads in the mix.
• 22:23
  Mike Boland: Um, it's sort of a contentious topic among sort of Apple fans that want to keep it an ad-free environment.
• 22:29
  Mike Boland: But Apple, like we talked about for OpenAI, is in a position where it needs to diversify its revenue as the iPhone, its cash cow, continues to reach sort of global deceleration in its growth and hits sort of uh global saturation.
• 22:42
  Mike Boland: So it's, you know, bolstering other revenue categories, everything from services, right?
• 22:47
  Mike Boland: Like Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple One subscription, iCloud, all of that.
• 22:53
  Mike Boland: It's it's really diversifying with a lot of that stuff.
• 22:56
  Mike Boland: And one of its diversification moves in that mix is advertising.
• 22:59
  Mike Boland: Right now, the only form of advertising it has is app store advertising.
• 23:03
  Mike Boland: Like you go into the app store, you search for something, it's a search-based ad for something else, try this app instead, et cetera.
• 23:09
  Mike Boland: So um, it's gonna be interesting to see like it grow its ad program and in a way that's very relevant for us in local.
• 23:15
  Mike Boland: So I think we'll dive into that and what we're seeing so far.
• 23:19
  Celine Matthiessen: That sounds great.
• 23:19
  Celine Matthiessen: I'm looking forward to it.
• 23:21
  Celine Matthiessen: And for everyone out there listening, thank you for joining us as well.
• 23:24
  Celine Matthiessen: We hope you are enjoying our podcast this year.
• 23:27
  Celine Matthiessen: And if you have any topics that you'd like to suggest or want to come on as a guest, reach out to us at podcast@ BIA.com.
• 23:34
  Celine Matthiessen: We look forward to bringing you more insightful conversations on local media throughout the year ahead or the end of the year and the year ahead, right?
• 23:41
  Celine Matthiessen: Um, so have a great day.
• 23:42
  Celine Matthiessen: Thank you.
• 23:43
  Celine Matthiessen: Thank you, Mike.
• 23:44
  Mike Boland: Thanks.