Microsoft brings ads to its Bing chat

Microsoft has announced that it is bringing ads to its AI-powered Bing chat, its new search agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft corporate vice president, in a blogpost said, the company is “exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response”. According to the company, there are now more than 100 million daily active users of Bing. New scenarios like chat are driving engagement, including more than 100 million chats. The company also mentioned that of the millions of users in Preview, one-third are new to Bing, creating a net new opportunity for publishers. Seeing the encouragement the Bing chat is getting, the tech giant shared updates on their goals, approach, and early progress, which it will be bringing to the AI chatbot. “First, we want to drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search. It is a top goal for us, and we measure success in part by how much traffic we are sending from the new Bing/Edge. Second, we want to increase revenue to publishers. We seek to do this by both driving more traffic to them through new features like chat and answers and by also pioneering the future of advertising in these new mediums,” the company said. “Lastly, we want to go about this in a collaborative fashion working with the industry to continue to foster a healthy ecosystem,” it added.