Microsoft is bringing ads to its Bing AI chatbot

Microsoft has just revealed that it is now exploring ways to bring ads to the responses produced by its Bing AI chatbot.

This was announced in a blog post by Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi, saying that Microsoft is exploring placing ads in the chat experience in order to share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.

Although it still remains unclear as to how these ads will be shown, Debarghya Das shared his experience with the new Bing popping up an answer with a small indicator of an ad being displayed after his query.

Other users who have tested out the new Bing AI chatbot have also reported that ads had been there since its launch but it still remains unclear how frequently ads would be shown when Bing AI is made available for all users.

Bing Chat now has Ads!

It's going to be fascinating to see how the unit economics of Ads in language models will unfold and affect search advertising.

1/3 pic.twitter.com/o5YjRjikOP

— Deedy (@deedydas) March 29, 2023

Moreover, Mircosoft also shared other experiments such as an expanded hover experience over a link.

With over 100 million users now, it is somewhat controversial to bring ads into the Bing AI chatbot for most users. However, on the topic of it being a revenue stream, it does capitalize on the fact that the number of users and traffic continues to grow.