Microsoft Moves to Monetize the New Bing

Microsoft today revealed how it plans to monetize the new AI-based Bing search service with advertising.

“There are now more than 100 million daily active users of Bing,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explains. “New scenarios like chat are driving engagement, including more than 100 million chats. Of the millions of users in Preview, one-third are new to Bing, creating net new opportunity for publishers. This is still early data, but the signs are encouraging.”

Microsoft will monetize the new Bing much as it does today: the site will remain free to use but will be supported by advertising. But a “top goal” of the new Bing is to drive traffic to the publishers that advertise with the service, and Microsoft plans to “increase revenue to publishers.”

To this end, Microsoft is now “exploring additional capabilities for publishers including [its] more than 7,500 Microsoft Start partner brands.” Some early ideas include:

• 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.
• A rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content besides the chat answer helping to drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start where Microsoft shares ad revenue with its partners.
• Ads right in the chat experience. Microsoft is also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.

The enshittification begins.