Pretty nice, ouch on the $733M fine by the EU. This bit was what I'm watching:
> Bing search advertising revenue grew 40%, and U.S.
> search share grew to 19.2%.
40% growth on Search Advertising revenue against a 23% gain on 'sites revenue' for Google. I wish Microsoft would break out their CPC numbers but expect that is a bit much to ask.
You got to remember Bing is coming off a much smaller base. I don't see grand plans with Bing, as oppose to google. For eg, Google envisioned Adwords and worked on "free" google analytics. This way they have very wide penetration in web sites market and they know each individual user behaviour which can then be marketed based on their interests.
I'm not somewhere I can check this but, last I looked, Microsoft loses a billion dollars a year on Bing. So a 40% revenue growth means they just wouldn't be losing as much.
This is the not the case anymore. A lot of the early loses were necessary investments to establish the infrastructure needed to compete with google in search.
I'm not talking "early losses". Microsoft lost $1 billion every year on Bing until at least two years ago. Compare that to Google profiting billions every year and you can see Bing is no Google.
Like you, I had similar information and I've tried a couple of different paths to figure out what the current state of affairs is. There are some Microsofties reading this, feel free to let me know off line (I'll keep your confidence) whether or not these gains are being translated into bottom line improvements yet.
Since Bing is only 5 years old, I would consider losses 2 years ago to still be early. Also, reported numbers were usually on Microsoft Online Services Division as a whole which included other money losing businesses like MSN
