Brands can no longer afford to ignore Bing

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 | By Will Cooper

Yusuf Mehdi, senior VP of Microsoft’s online audience business, said with Bing having over 30% market share once the Yahoo deal is completed, it becomes a compelling opportunity for brands.

A year ago – even six months ago – this would seem like a bold statement coming from a company that has repeatedly failed to set the search world alight. But, albeit gradually, Bing seems to be capturing web users’ attention.

ComScore data released last month showed Bing queries increasing by 6%, from 1.48bn in November to 1.58bn in the US in December, with market share up from 10.3% to 10.7%.

In contrast, runaway leader Google’s share remained stable, with 65.7% of the US market, while Yahoo slipped from 17.5% to 17.3%.

At this rate Bing will be level with Yahoo before the end of the year.

So is now the time to say that Bing’s looking as if it can deliver? Certainly on launch, agencies and brands welcomed a new (or at least refreshed) entry into the market but remained sceptical it would ever get the scale they wanted.

A combined Yahoo-Bing offering would still be half of Google’s share in the US and much less in the UK, but 30% of the largest online ad sector isn’t something to be scoffed at.

Microsoft has proved to advertisers it can grow the Bing brand from a relatively small user base in these first few months, so now the question is whether it can continue the growth after the Yahoo merger.

Nevertheless, for the moment at least, Microsoft has silenced many of those who thought Bing was another white elephant.

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