- Microsoft reveals plans to monetize its new Bing Chat AI.
- As part of the plan, the company plans to insert more advertisement units into the chatbot.
- It hasn’t been decided how the advertisements will appear in the new Bing experience.
Microsoft confirms plans to insert more advertisements to monetize its Bing Chat AI. The writing was on the wall. It was just a matter of time. According to an announcement, Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi revealed that the company is exploring ways to place ads in the new Bing chatbot experience.
The company has actually been testing advertisement placements on Bing for some time, and units have been part of the chatbot since the beginning as sponsored links and in those occasional search results you will see when using Bing Chat. You can check an example of how Microsoft is testing this new type of monetization with the screenshot that someone published on Twitter. The screenshot shows a Bing Chat AI response with specific citations labeled as “ad,” in this case, two citations.
The idea is to keep monetizing Bing as the company does today with the search engine through advertisers to maintain the service accessible for free.
Microsoft also explains that this new type of search has a lot of questions since the chatbot can provide answers using the content from the web without the user having to access any website. However, according to the company, the top goal is to drive more traffic while increasing revenue for publishers.
As a result, the company is exploring additional capabilities, some of which include the ability to hover over fragments of the Bing Chat AI response to reveal links so that the users can access the website with the source of the content.
A rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content, besides the response to help drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start, where the company shares revenue with its partners (publishers). And lastly, advertisement placements inside the Bing Chat AI experience.
The company is even exploring placing advertisement units in the chat and sharing revenue with partners that contributed to the answer.
Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi says that the company is in the early days, and so far, the feedback has been positive as it continues to find more opportunities to monetize the experience.
Mauro Huculak is a Windows expert and the Editor-in-Chief who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He is also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 12 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows, software, and related technologies, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.