Microsoft Displaying “Microsoft Start Newsletter” Ad Banner on Outlook Website

Today I received a new advertisement banner or bar showing at the top of my Outlook.com email account homepage. The advertisement was promoting Microsoft Start which is an email newsletter service provided by Microsoft. The advertisement was showing in form of a tiny horizontal banner below the new Ribbon toolbar.

Following screenshot shows the new Microsoft Start newsletter advertisement displaying on Outlook.com website’s account homepage:

The ad title was “Microsoft Start newsletters deliver top stories to your inbox. Subscribe now“.

After refreshing the Outlook.com page, the ad title was changed a little. The new ad title was “Subscribe to the Start Unfold newsletter from Microsoft Start. Sign me up” as shown in following screenshot:

The whole ad banner was clickable and when I clicked on the banner, it opened Microsoft Start newsletter signup page. The URL of the page is as following:

The bizbar2 term present at the end of the URL was changed to bizbar4 when the ad title was changed. It’s a URL parameter to detect which ad title was clicked by the user.

PS: There was a Close (X) button given at the right-side of the ad banner to close or hide the advertisement. But the ad banner comes back after refreshing or re-opening the page.

It’s not the first time when Microsoft is showing ads on Outlook.com website. We reported in June 2022 when Microsoft started testing ads on Outlook.com website.

Check out following article for details:

Is Microsoft Testing Ads in Email Messages List of Outlook?

You can also check out following exclusive articles to learn more about the new Ribbon toolbar added at the top of Outlook.com account page:

Microsoft Outlook Website Getting Redesigned Ribbon Toolbar

[Tip] Hide or Remove Ribbon from Microsoft Outlook Website

For your information, here are some technical information about my browser and operating system used to get the above mentioned ad banner in Outlook:

Operating system: Windows 11 22H2 (public stable version fully updated)

Web browser: Mozilla Firefox 108.0.1

Email: A very old Hotmail ID

Have you also received this new type of ad banner in your Hotmail or other Microsoft Account page? Please share your experience and opinion about these new types of ads introduced by Microsoft in Outlook.