
A Farewell to Bing Cashback - alexandros
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/06/04/a-farewell-to-bing-cashback.aspx
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illumin8
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.

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baddox
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).

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chrischen
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.

~~~
masterj
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.

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

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

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rishi
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...](http://flywheelblog.com/2009/05/why-microsoft-cashback-is-working/)

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

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

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axod
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.

~~~
dangrossman
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.

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technomancy
> 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.

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

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

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MicahWedemeyer
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.

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leviathant
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.

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

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37prime
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.

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Goronmon
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._

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aarongough
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...

