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June 1, 2019 05:34 pm

After 10 Years, Bing Is 'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore'

Bloomberg remembers the launch of Bing ten years ago -- "It was all a little sad". There was even a jingle-writing contest in which song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann won a $500 gift card for his song "Bing Goes the Internet". (After TechCrunch called it "awful" and compared it to the sound of dying cows, the songwriter released a second song which consisted of nothing but the text of TechCrunch's article.) Now Bloomberg asks, "How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter?"What seemed like a typical Microsoft reaction to fear of Google has become -- with the help of blood, sweat, tears and the Nadellaissance -- a nice business. Microsoft now generates about $7.5 billion in annual revenue from web search advertising. That is a pipsqueak compared with Google's $120 billion in ad sales over the last 12 months. But it's more revenue brought in by either Microsoft's LinkedIn professional network or the company's line of Surface computers and other hardware... Microsoft in recent years outsourced chunks of its advertising business and stuck Bing in spots that Microsoft controls or that Google couldn't grab. Importantly, Microsoft made Bing front and center for people using search boxes on Windows computers and Office software, practically guaranteeing that a healthy share of PC owners would wittingly or unwittingly use the "decision engine." Research firm comScore estimates Microsoft accounts for a little under one-quarter of U.S. web searches conducted on desktop computers. Microsoft's market share is far smaller outside the U.S. and practically nonexistent on smartphones... [T]his year it struck a deal to handle searches and ads tied to searches on Yahoo, AOL and other Verizon Communications Inc. internet properties. Those aren't glamorous corners of the internet, but they have a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of people searching for running shoes and local dentists. All that helps use of Bing and lifts the ad revenue that flows through Microsoft's accounts. Microsoft has also pared costs to the point where Bing stopped bleeding red ink... Bing at least stands on its own two feet, and company executives have said that Microsoft has learned from the search business how to run big data-collecting and crunching technologies. The article argues that Bing's success has been good for Google, since it keeps them from looking like a monopoly.

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