Microsoft has announced the addition of advertisements to its AI-powered Bing chat, as well as its new search agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4.
According to Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president at Microsoft, in a blog post, the company is “exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.”
Bing now has more than 100 million daily active users, according to the company. New scenarios, such as chat, are driving engagement, with over 100 million chats.
According to the company, one-third of the millions of users in Preview are new to Bing, creating a net new opportunity for publishers.
Seeing the positive response to the Bing chat, the tech giant shared updates on their goals, approach, and strategy.
“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,” Microsoft added
The addition of ads to GPT-4 is Microsoft striking while the iron is hot.