Bing Finally Turned a Profit
October 7, 2016
Bing is the redheaded stepchild of search engines, but according to the Motley Fool the Microsoft owned search engine started to earn a profit during its last fiscal year. The Motley Fool shares the story in “Bing Became Profitable Last Year. Can It Keep Up?” Bing’s search advertising generated $5.5 billion in estimated revenue, which is more than what Twitter and Tencent earned. Into 2016, Bing continues to turn a profit.
Bing’s revenue grew in Microsoft’s last fiscal year quarter and in June 40% of the search revenue came from Windows 10 devices. When the free Windows 10 upgrade ends soon and thus will end the growth, as Bing will no longer be see a high adoption rate. Microsoft will continue to grow Bing and profit is predicted to continue to rise:
One important factor is that Microsoft outsourced its display advertising business at the beginning of fiscal 2016. That has allowed the company to focus its sales team on its search advertisements, which generally carry higher prices and margins than display ads. That makes the sales team more cost-efficient for Microsoft to run while it collects high-margin revenue from outsourcing its display ads.
This means Microsoft will raise its ad prices and will focus on selling more ads to appear with search results. Bing will never compete with Google’s massive revenue, but it has proven that it is less of a copycat and a stable, profit generating search engine.
Whitney Grace, October 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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