Microsoft could soon place ads within its AI-powered Bing chatbot, company Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said in a recent blog post.
According to Microsoft, “the new Bing” already has more than 100 million daily active users. “People are finding value in having search, chat, answers, and creation capabilities all in one experience.”
With Bing’s growing popularity, Microsoft wants to make sure that the so-called “copilot for the Web” continues to drive more traffic and value to the publishers whose content it uses to formulate answers to users’ queries. One of the ways Microsoft believes it will be able to do so is by putting ads within the Bing chat experience.
The company said it is “exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.”
Microsoft said that Bing already incorporates features that point users to its sources, including citations within the body of the chat answers that contain links to sources, and “learn more” links at the bottom of answers.
Thanks to these features, data shows that the chatbot is already driving more traffic to publishers from all types of users. However, ad placements are among the options Microsoft is considering to further enrich publishers whose content Bing uses after meeting with some of its partners.
“These conversations are early days but we’re hearing positive feedback as we look for opportunities to maximize these new experiences for the entire ecosystem,” said Yusuf Mehdi.
Other methods Microsoft is currently exploring to help ensure Bing generates value for publishers include an expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher in an answer will display more, related links from their website, and a rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content beside the chat answer for Microsoft Start partners.
Last week, Microsoft launched Bing Image Creator — an AI image generator powered by an advanced version of OpenAI’s DALL-E.
