Users have reported seeing adverts inside the Bing chatbot experience in recent days. Based on what we’ve observed so far, the GPT-4-powered chatbot embeds relevant ad links in replies to consumers’ genuine enquiries. Advertising do not seem to be appearing for the majority of people (including us), but they will most certainly appear more often and in more locations in the near future. Microsoft Corporate VP for Search and Devices Yusuf Mehdi stated in a recent article on the Bing blog that the firm is actively testing inserting advertisements in Bing’s chat experience, implying that the examples we’ve seen so far are part of its experimentation. He also highlighted how the business aims to include more advertisements into the new Bing experience.
Thus far, the advertising that appear for users take the form of a linked citation, as well as extra links in a “Learn More” area under Bing’s answer to their inquiry. In the future, Microsoft may create an experience in which lingering over a link from an advertiser displays additional links from its website in the aim of increasing traffic to it. The business is also investigating the possibility of displaying rich captions from its Start customised news feed publishers alongside the AI chatbot’s comments.
The fact that Microsoft is monetizing its Bing chatbot is a foregone conclusion. The issue was never “Will the firm do it?” but rather “How will the company do it?” And now we know what the tech titan’s early ambitions are. According to Mehdi’s tweet, Bing now has more than 100 million daily active users since the launch of the chatbot. Since one-third of those users are new to Bing, they represent a fresh potential for marketers, and Microsoft plainly aims to seize the moment.
