Over the past few days, users have reported seeing ads within the Bing chatbot experience. Based on the limited examples we’ve seen, the GPT-4 powered chatbot embeds relevant ad links in response to users’ actual questions. The ads don’t seem to be showing up for most people yet (including us), but they’ll probably pop up more often in more places soon. In a new post on Bing blog, Microsoft Corporate VP for Search and Devices Yusuf Mehdi admitted that the company is currently exploring placing ads in the Bing chat experience, indicating that the samples we’ve seen so far part of its experiment. He also revealed how the company intends to embed more ads into the new Bing experience.
Currently, the ads that appear for users are in the form of a linked citation, with additional links in a “Learn More” section below Bing’s response to their query. In the future, Microsoft may roll out an experience where hovering over a link from an advertiser will reveal more links from its website in hopes of driving more traffic to it. The company is also exploring the idea of adding rich captions from Start personalized news feed publishers right next to AI chatbot responses.
The fact that Microsoft is monetizing its Bing chatbot is a welcome development. In the beginning, the question was never “Will the company do it?” but “How does the company do this?” And now we have an idea of the tech giant’s initial plans. As Mehdi said in his post, Bing gained more than 100 million daily active users after the chatbot came out. Since 1/3 of those users are new to Bing, they present a new opportunity for advertisers, and Microsoft clearly intends to strike while the iron is hot.
