- Microsoft confirms plans to add ads to conversations with its Bing Chat AI
- The exact way in which these ads are displayed is currently at the heart of experimentation by Microsoft – these ads have been displayed to certain users since the very beginning of Bing Chat
- Microsoft intends to display these ads automatically – and share the revenue with the 7,500 brands and partner sites enrolled in its Microsoft Start program.
Microsoft unveils on his blog its plan to integrate ads into Bing Chat conversations, its artificial intelligence-based chatbot. With over 100 million daily active users, this development was expected. The company explained that ads will appear in chatbot responses, just like in traditional search results.
In reality, ads in Bing Chat aren’t exactly new. The firm has been testing different implementation methods for several weeks – but these were not displayed to all users. Only a small subset of Bing Chat users see them. On our side, we may have tried to display them, but the advertisements are currently absent from our conversations with Bing’s AI.
Microsoft confirms advertising in Bing Chat conversations
Since we are talking about a real plan of attack, the blog post goes back at length to the advertising model that Microsoft wants to develop with AI. The goal is not to upset the fundamentals of the web too much, by allowing its economy to maintain itself and progress. Microsoft emphasizes wanting to bring more pure traffic to sources by integrating them with Bing Chat responses.
This placement will be automated, since unlike classic paid referencing it is not really possible to buy a suite of keywords. As a result, Microsoft will place these advertisements itself according to their relevance (we imagine that this will be decided by the GPT-4 model used by the firm). The revenue generated will then be automatically shared between the publishers and Microsoft.
In detail, we do not know exactly how the company intends to manage the number and frequency of these advertisements, nor if these advertisements will be restricted to text boxes, hypertext links or if larger, visible, differentiating or even intrusive formats. will be used.
Microsoft Vice President Yusuf Mehdi explains in the blog post that the company wants “share ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response”but that doesn’t answer the question of the balance Microsoft plans to strike between ad-free and ad-free responses, among other things that need to be clarified.
As we said above, advertisements have already been integrated into the chat experience since the launch of the preview version in February. They appear most often in the form of sponsored links and inside the shopping results of some users.
Tweeter Debarghya Das shares an example of a conversation around “cheap Honda cars” – you can see in the screenshot how those ads were placed in the text in this case:
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 (@debarghya_das) March 29, 2023
In reality, Microsoft has already been testing, as we told you above, advertisements in Bing for some time, and has been discussing the subject with advertising agencies since at least February. We note in passing that if these advertisements are already displayed by some users, we have had no word on the timetable for their generalization. Officially Bing Chat is still in the Preview phase (sort of beta) for an indefinite period.
