The success of the Window 10 upgrade in Microsoft operating systems is bearing fruit for the native search engine, Bing. For as far back as it has existed, the engine has been a laughing stock of sorts with a seemingly endless drain on finances marking it doomed. And yet, the parent company has stuck with it, and this faith now appears to be paying dividends. At long last.
With the announcing of Microsoft’s last quarter results came the somewhat surprising news that Bing, as the company had promised, had finally returned a profit. Advertising revenue from the search engine contributed more than $1 billion in the past three months.
Not only is this news extremely welcoming to Microsoft ears on a standalone basis, what it signals is a critical step on the path to redemption. Indeed, on the earnings call, Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said these results were here to stay.
“In search, we expect Bing’s strong trajectory to continue, remaining profitable for the remainder of the year.”
Considering Bing’s US market share in search engine advertising is hovering above 20%, Hood may well be right.
As highlighted at the start of this article however, the importance of Microsoft’s release of Windows 10 cannot be overlooked. Its deliberate integration efforts, putting Bing at the centre of a lot of online Windows actions, has dramatically shifted performance.
The tech giant said in October that
“Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 29 percent in constant currency with Bing US market share benefiting from Windows 10 usage.”
All this is to say that whilst most search engine optimisation efforts are centred around Google, Google SERPs and Google’s crawler – and rightly so – more and more attention should be directed to third parties such as Bing, whose rise seems to correlate with an easing of public sympathy for the monopoly that is Google.