Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
Wait, Google doesn't manipulate search results for money? Could've fooled me.