Have you ever heard of the phrase: “Bing it”? Chances are, you probably have not. Most of us use the verb google instead when referring to searching for information on the internet. Google dominates the market of search engines with a market share of 92.96 percent (Statcounter, 2019). I myself even forgot Bing existed until recently when I heard the phrase mentioned above on the television show Hawaii Five-0. This made me wonder; is Bing a failure?
After a few Google searches, I stumbled upon the answers, and it might surprise you. Bing is not a failure, on the contrary, Bing can be considered a success. Even though their total market share in the market of search engines is a measly 2.34 percent, they made over $5 billion in annual revenue in 2017. $1.8 billion in search ad revenue alone that year. In 2019 their revenue has grown with $3 billion all the way up to $8 billion. The revenue of Bing is significantly larger than companies like Twitter ($3 billion) and Snapchat ($0.32 billion); companies that enjoy a better brand reputation than Bing (Statista, 2019). This begs the following question; how did Bing achieve these results?
The answer is simple. Bing is owned by Microsoft, which also owns Windows. With almost 80% of the operating systems in the world being a form of Windows (Statcounter, 2019), Microsoft, more or less controls our computing experience. Windows ships with either Internet Explorer or Edge as the internet browser, with Bing as its standard search engine. There is a portion of the population that stick with the default option presented to them and never change them if they work good enough. By controlling the software and the browsers, Microsoft is able to capitalize on this part of the population, even though their total market share is small. If Microsoft did not have the ability to control the software and the browsers of the people, Bing would probably have failed.
Did you know about the success of Bing? Did you forget about Bing? Or do are you one of the people that uses Bing over Google? Let me know in the comments below!
References
Statcounter. (2019). Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide. Retrieved from https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/
Statcounter. (2019). Search Engine Market Share. Retrieved from https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Statista. (2019). Statistics & Facts. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/topics/28827/snapchat/
Statista. (2019). Statistics & Facts. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/topics/737/twitter/
