Bing has a billion active users, yet Microsoft has fired up another $2 million giveaway to boost traffic - why is that?

Microsoft is offering those searching with Bing a chance to win some tempting prizes which are part of a $2,000,000 giveaway.

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Windows Latest noticed a pop-up promoting this big 'prize drop' which appeared after a Bing search.

Apparently, half of that money, a cool million, is being given away as cash, and the other half in various prizes.

This is a Microsoft Rewards sweepstakes program and as the web page for the campaign explains, there's a grand prize you can enter the draw for, but also daily 'instant win' prizes that can be had by using Bing.

The prizes include some luxury cars (from Mercedes), laptops (Copilot+ PCs of course) and handhelds (the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally), along with Dyson AirWrap Multi-Stylers (which comes a bit out of left-field), and some Apple AirPods (bizarrely). There are also a whole lot of $50 and $100 Microsoft or Xbox gift cards which are up for grabs.

We've seen these big win sweepstakes before, as Windows Latest points out, and perhaps it's not surprising to see Microsoft embarking on another fresh drive to persuade folks to make more use of Bing.

Well, except that it seems a little strange in light of a piece of recent news - namely the recent revelation from CEO Satya Nadella that Bing now commands a billion active users worldwide.

Nadella floated that eye-opening statistic in a recent earnings call for fiscal Q3, and it begs the question - if Bing is doing so well, why is Microsoft continuing to pay for costly promotions like this to try and push adoption of the search engine?

The Copilot factor

The answer, of course, is that while Bing's active users may tally a billion, what Microsoft didn't share is how many of those are everyday folks heading to Bing.com to make a search - and how many are driven by other avenues.

By which I mean searches that come from Windows 11, whether that's from the taskbar search box (and web searches integrated therein), or indeed people using Copilot (with the AI then leveraging a Bing search as part of its response). I suspect business users querying Copilot at work represent quite a bit of this traffic.

When we look at Bing's independently judged search engine market share, it's around the 10% mark, hugely adrift of Google - so clearly there aren't a billion consumers out there regularly hitting up Microsoft's search (at least not directly, by choice, anyway).

Which is why Microsoft needs to keep throwing a lot of money at these sweepstakes and other giveaways. While I didn't see a pop-up for Microsoft's latest 'prize drop' myself when searching on Bing, I did get a prompt to install the Microsoft Rewards extension for Chrome to "turn your searches into gift cards".

Microsoft isn't shy about pushing these various promotional bits and pieces right now, that much is clear. If you're interested in the current sweepstakes, note that it ends on May 21.