Over the past few days, users have reported Watch ads Within the Bing chatbot experience. Based on the limited examples we’ve seen, the GPT-4 chatbot embeds relevant advertising links in responses to actual users’ questions. The ads don’t seem to be showing up for most people (us included) yet, but they will likely appear more frequently and in more places soon. In a new post on Bing blogYousef Mahdi, Microsoft’s Vice President of Search and Devices, admitted that the company is currently exploring placing ads in the Bing chat experience, noting that the samples we’ve seen so far are part of its experience. He also revealed how the company intends to include more ads in the new Bing experience.
So far, the ads shown to users come in the form of an associated quote, along with additional links in the “More Information” section below Bing’s response to their query. In the future, Microsoft could launch an experiment where hovering over a link from an advertiser will bring up more links from their website in hopes of driving more traffic to it. The company is also exploring the idea of adding rich captions from the publishers of Start’s custom news feed next to the AI chatbot’s responses.
The fact that Microsoft is monetizing the Bing chatbot is an expected development. From the beginning, the question was never “Will the company do it?” But “How will the company do it?” And now we have an idea of the tech giant’s initial plans. As Mehdi said in his post, Bing amassed more than 100 million daily active users after the chatbot came out. Since a third of these users are new to Bing, they offer a new opportunity for advertisers, and Microsoft clearly intends to strike while the iron is hot.
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