A lot of unfounded rumors circulate around when it comes to Microsoft and its businesses. Apart from the frivolous notion that the company wants to sell its Surface and Xbox divisions, despite countless statements by Satya Nadella to the contrary, there are also rumors that the Bing search engine hemorrhages money. Today, the vice president for Microsoft’s ad business, Rik van der Kooi, stated that the search site pays for itself right now. Bing is now a multibillion-dollar self-sustaining business.
In an interview with Marketing Land, van der Kooi stated that the company remains deeply committed on the search side. The interview came after it was reported on Monday that AOL is taking over Microsoft’s ad sales business in a deal that will see Bing replace Google as AOL’s default search engine for the next decade.
van der Kooi added that Microsoft’s search business was thriving and emphasized it was a sustainable and standalone business. Bing is an important component in a number of Microsoft products such as computers and phones so the rumor that Microsoft wished to sell it didn’t make much sense to begin with.
Bing’s market share keeps on increasing at the expense of Google and Yahoo. Earlier this year, Bing’s share topped 20%. While it’ll be a while before it rivals Google’s 64.6% market share, it does point to healthy growth. Considering that companies like Apple even use Bing for services like Siri and that Windows 10 utilizes Bing in a variety of ways, expect this share to go up even more when the new operating system launches next month.
Source: Fortune
Asher Madan is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 182 articles to ICXM in 2015, focused on Windows and PC, and Xbox news: joined Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017 covering Xbox news, hardware, and reviews.