The new Bing has been available in preview for close to two months and it has revolutionized how users interact with the internet by adding new capabilities to the conventional search experience such as Bing Chat, answers, and content creation. And while the entry is an incredible feat, the process hasn’t been a smooth sail since it has faced its fair share of criticism as well as applause.
A major concern among users, publishers to be specific, has been how the new search experience will impact their traffic despite Bing crossing over 100 million daily active users. Well, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President & Consumer Marketing Office, Yusuf Mehdi indicates that driving traffic to publishers and increasing their revenue are both the company’s top objectives.
Microsoft has also highlighted its plans to work closely with key industry players to establish a healthy ecosystem. But how exactly will this be possible? Mehdi has indicated that there are plans underway to incorporate ads into Bing Chat responses.
Per the company’s findings, Bing Chat is “driving more traffic from all types of users.” Since its debut, usage has increased significantly. Bing Chat responses feature source links as well as citations, which translates to more traffic for publishers.
Microsoft hasn’t provided a clear picture of how it intends to incorporate ads into the experience, but it has been touching base with partners that are part of the Microsoft Start news feed service and have been brainstorming and exchanging ideas on the best way forward.
The company has also provided an early look at what lies ahead:
- An expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage and driving more traffic to the publisher’s website.
- For our Microsoft Start partners, placing a rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content beside the chat answer helping to drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start where we share the ad revenue with the partner. We’re also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.
Here’s a glimpse of how the experience will look like once Microsoft incorporates ads:
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Of course, these plans are still in the early stages and Microsoft is still receiving more feedback which will impact how it implements these changes.
In Bing-related news, Bing Chat’s daily chat turn limit was recently upped to 200. Microsoft also debuted the top-request feature in Bing Chat dubbed Chat History which lets users access their chat history with Bing.
What are your thoughts on Microsoft adding ads to Bing Chat? Let us know in the comments.
