According to Reuters, Bing is not only still alive and kicking, it will soon be bringing home the bacon for parent MSN.
According to one of its top executives, Microsoft Corp’s 10-month-old search engine Bingis expected to make money online eventually
MSN has reportedly lost more than $5 billion over the past four years but hopes change that with the search advertising partnership with Yahoo Inc.
Reuters story says:
“As soon as we close and implement the Yahoo deal, we have achieved a milestone: for advertisers, we are a credible No. 2,” Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, said in an interview on Tuesday.
“Really now, the goal is about share gain. If we grow share, we will grow our way into profitability, and we have confidence we can do that,” said Mehdi, who is charged with making Bing and the MSN portal a financial success.
According to ComScore, Microsoft has bumped up to 10.7 percent of the U.S. search marketplace from 8 percent in June (before Bing’s launch).
That means it is still trailing Google and Yahoo, but if U.S. regulators approve a deal that makes Bing the underlying search engine for Yahoo, Microsoft will control almost 30 percent of the search market – enough to attract major advertiser attention.
“At 30 points we are now a credible option, so that number matters,” said Mehdi. “The nice thing is we can say (to advertisers) you can be close to 30 percent share in one easy buy. That 30 percent carries a lot of weight in the marketplace.”
This could be the break MSN has been waiting for, and Yahoo’s apparent surrender of the search market comes at a perfect time for the fledgling engine Bing.
Google’s annual revenue is more than $23 billion – and they don’t quite have a monopoly yet – plenty more where that came from!
The biggest part of moving into profit “is just getting the scale,” said Mehdi. “We’re built out to be a much larger player. We’ve spent the money and built out in such a way that we can be a player at scale. Every day that we grow a tenth of point of share, that moves us further up the curve.”
The Bing application has been a hit on Apple Inc’s mobile devices, and it is rumoured that Apple is considering making it the default search application on its iPhone. Inaddition, AOL is said to be on the market, and MSN could be a player in that bidding war, if it comes to pass.
The fat lady has yet to sing, by a long shot, but many feel that Bing has the best chance of unseating Google from it’s complacent stance as ruler of the internets.
“Ultimately we want to be a major player at scale, so we’re going to have to grow against Google at some point,” said Mehdi.
But “we’re still outmanned and outgunned by Google, they still have way more engineers than we do.”
Tags: advertising, Bing, Google, market share, MSN