Over the past few days, users have reported see advertisements within the Chatbot Bing experience. Based on the limited examples we have seen, the Powered by GPT-4 the chatbot embeds relevant advertising links in answers to real user questions. Ads don’t seem to show up for most people yet (including us), but they will most likely show up more frequently and in more places soon. In a new post on the Bing Blog, Microsoft’s vice president for search and devices, Yusuf Mehdi, admitted that the company is currently considering putting ads in Bing’s chat experience, saying the samples we’ve seen so far do part of his experiment. He also revealed how the company plans to integrate more ads into the new Bing experience.
So far, the ads that appear to users come in the form of a linked quote, along with additional links in a “Learn more” section below Bing’s response to their query. In the future, Microsoft may launch an experiment where hovering over an advertiser’s link will show more links from its website in hopes of driving more traffic to it. The company is also exploring the idea of adding rich captions from its Start a personalized newsfeed editors right next to AI chatbot responses.
The fact that Microsoft is monetizing its Bing chatbot is an expected development. From the start, the question was never “Will the company do it?” but “How is the company going to do it?” And now we have an idea of the tech giant’s initial plans. As Mehdi said in his post, Bing has amassed more than 100 million daily active users after the release of the chatbot. Given that a third of these users are new to Bing, they present a new opportunity for advertisers, and Microsoft clearly intends to strike while the iron is hot.
