Saturday, July 21, 2018

Why Bing is not a failure?

We all have heard and seem to know 'Nobody uses Bing'. But, in reality, 33% of searches in the US are powered by Bing. With 1.3B searches a month, that translates to about ~$5B in revenue. This revenue is the same as Youtube. Bing is making a profit when all other tech start-ups are bleeding cash in the hope of generating revenue in the long run. Bing is a self-sustaining and profitable business.

This can be attributed to the power of defaults. 82% of the world's computers run on Windows. IE is not loved but comes as the default internet browser. Microsoft integrated Bing into a wide range of its software and hardware services, including Microsoft Office, Xbox, and Cortana. And it recently renewed a partnership between Bing and Yahoo. People are too lazy to change the defaults or don't know how to, pushing traffic to Bing.

In 2013 Siri changed its search engine to Bing, Google has to now send a check of $3B every year to Apple to remain the search engine for Siri - this was probably the most expensive switch ever!

Bing's efforts to operate leaner, a clear edict under current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, combined with not having such large investments in resources as it did in the early days have arguably helped put it on a more stable financial footing. Meanwhile, its many partnerships and integrations have helped Bing's share of the U.S. desktop search market, potentially drawing in more search advertising revenue.

Bing is still way behind Google, but more and more, it is looking like a contender.



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