• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 16, 2024

Traffic data on the day OpenAI made its latest announcement shows another daily peak in visits to the company's services, according to Similarweb data, saying that the rise in traffic is a good sign if OpenAi is determined to build a massive audience with fewer features behind a paywall.

Following Monday’s OpenAI announcement of GPT 4o, daily traffic reached 96.2 million visits, up 16% from the previous daily peak set a few days before. 

GPT 4o responds to voice, image, and video prompts as well as text input.

During the announcement, the company said it would make its GPT generative AI algorithms, including many new features, available in the free version of its platform. This also means that developers building Custom GPTs for OpenAI’s app store will gain access to a bigger audience.

Similarweb estimates if traffic levels seen during the past week are maintained for the rest of the month, OpenAI chatgpt.com monthly visits could to top 2 billion -- a significant jump from its previous monthly traffic peak of 1.8 billion visits in May 2023.

Microsoft is benefiting from its $13 billion investment in OpenAI. On Monday, the company said it has built GPT 4o into Azure. 

The combination of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in Bing generated about 5 billion chats in the first year, with numbers doubling in the past quarter.

Copilot launched in the ad platform last month.  Searches combined with AI chats see a 30% uplift in engagement compared with only search, the company said during a presentation on Thursday.

Microsoft has integrated GAI throughout its services and advertising platforms, such as Performance Max. The group that was the fastest to adopt Microsoft Performance Max saw in aggregate an increase of 265% in clicks, a 113% increase in impressions and a 66% increase in clickthrough rates, from 1.8% to 3%, the company said.

Microsoft is trying to sell advertisers on its expansive network of partnerships such as Netflix, Roku, Axel Springer -- as well as more than 1 billion people, many of whom use Bing and other Microsoft-related platforms, but not Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.  Some 58 million who use Bing and do not on Amazon, for example, and 217 million on Bing do not use Pinterest.