With its AI reinvention, Microsoft’s Bing has reached new heights in popularity and users. Now Microsoft is preparing to try to drive more traffic to publishers, as well as further monetize the product with more ads.
The “new Bing” powered by GPT-4 has a cleaner interface compared to traditional search and one that’s mostly free of the advertising we’re used to seeing alongside search results.
Advertisements have been a part of the experience pretty much since the beginning as many users have noticed, but Microsoft is now further embedding ads within Bing chat responses.
As highlighted by Debarghya Das on Twitter, Microsoft is now embedding actual ad links into Bing’s chatbot responses. This appears in the form of the word “ad” as a hyperlink in the citations of the responses. In the example below, it appears in a response about cars alongside actual cited information.
As of now, it doesn’t seem like these ad links are appearing all that often or consistently, but it’s interesting to see Microsoft experimenting with this sort of thing.
At the same time, Microsoft today also published a blog post detailing its efforts to drive more traffic to publishers, where the Bing chatbot pulls its information from in the first place. The company explains that it is working on ways to drive more traffic, including a new feature (pictured below) that shows more information about a link or citation when hovering over the link. Microsoft says that early preview tests of these efforts are “driving more traffic from all types of users.”
More on Bing:
- Bing’s AI Image Creator is faster with ‘boosts’ earned by committing to Microsoft’s ecosystem
- Report: Bing sees 15.8% boost in visits following GPT-4 push, as Google sees a slight decline
- OpenAI launches GPT-4 with image input and better accuracy, powers new Bing
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