A Farewell to Bing Cashback | Hacker News Reader

A Farewell to Bing Cashback

bing.com

31 pointsalexandros22 comments

Looks like giving away money to get search traffic isn't a viable business model... whodathunkit?

Seriously, the really funny thing about BCB was doing my Christmas shopping last year. I never use Bing, except when I found out I could get 15% cash back for buying a laptop for my father-in-law through them. I got $75 cash (60 days later) and Bing got screwed... The only search traffic they got was FatWallet forum members clicking through to get their free money.

The huge newegg deal (was that Christmas?) was unbelievable. After deals/coupons/cashback I got a (low-budget but nice) 24 inch Samsung 1080p monitor for 170 USD (the cheapest 24" monitor on newegg now is 205 USD), and my friend spent about 1800 USD and thus got considerable cashback. Clearly that money was just straight from Microsoft's coffers, and I never once visited Bing (I learned of it from newegg's facebook page).

Yea it seemed ridiculously flawed. At one point they were offering 30% off whatever you bought on ebay, and I had Microsoft pay me $200 to get a new Macbook.

I got $150 off of a camera bought through eBay b/c of Bing. I can't imagine how they ever thought that made business sense.

It was actually 35% off when the program started (it was called Live.com back then). You can see the original Fatwallet thread here http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/arcmessageview.php?catid=18&...

During a few periods, Ebay was handing out 10% off coupons that could be stacked with the cashback program for incredible deals. I bought so much stuff that I maxed out my account the first year ($2500).

I know of some people who were buying gold ounces at under spot once BCB was factored in.

BCB is still alive and kicking until July 30th at 9:00 pm PST. Buy away fellow HNers.

MS purchased www.JellyFish.com for $50M which became cash back live. Here is a post from the Jelly Fish founder a few months back of how Cash Back is working for MS: http://flywheelblog.com/2009/05/why-microsoft-cashback-is-wo...

I actually bought into it. It seemed like it was working.

I never understood why microsoft doesn't roll out it's own adsense+adwords. It only makes sense to do it with bing.

They did. It failed. (TM)

http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/whatever-happened-to-msns-adse...

Well, they have the AdWords equivalent as far as search advertising. And advertising on Microsoft AdCenter not only gets you on Bing search results but Yahoo! as well. Yahoo! has completely outsourced their search advertising program to Microsoft as of this month.

I remember using Microsoft ClickTrade back in 1999 or so. It was actually quite reasonable then. It wasn't contextual like adsense, you had to choose your ads manually, but it worked ok enough. Then they shut it down.

All the CPC networks of the day shut down. Those that are still around dropped that pricing model in favor of CPA or CPM. The main problem was fraud. The companies weren't as sophisticated back then to be able to deal with click fraud like Google and Microsoft do now. It's still a challenge.

> Shopping remains one of the most important tasks people engage in while using search

Translation: shopping remains one of the most easily-monetized tasks people engage in while using search.

Looks like a great way to burn through 50Million in 2 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com

Thanks for posting this. I was considering integrating BCB into my marketplace, but now I'm glad I procrastinated.

Guess it's just Google Product Search from now on out. I hate being so dependent on GOOG, but they've been good to me so far.

The only time I use Bing is for Cashback. I guess I should have done some Googling with Bing while I was there, too. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.

Another epic MS failure. They should just rename the company "XBox"

Just like XBox business, Bing is also another loss leader for Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft would do anything to get market share since they have a gigantor war-chest. A year later with all the cheers from its usual supporters, Bing managed to get "some" increase on traffic. Well, I wonder how much of those are directly coming from Facebook search which Microsoft has a lot of stake in.

Are you sure the Xbox business is a loss leader?

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64R63P20100528

The entertainment business is in a stronger position, providing most, if not all, of the $851 million operating profit the [entertainment and devices unit] made in the first nine months of Microsoft's current fiscal year.

Originally the Xbox console itself was a loss-leader, with the games being sold to make back the money.

Now, I'm not so sure if that would still be true given that they must have made back their initial manufacturing investments by now...

It isn't fair to cherry-pick profitable quarters late in the life-cycle of a loss leader 'razor blades' model product. I don't know how profitable they have to be from now to the EOL of the 360 to be able to say the strategy paid off; anyone?

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