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Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program

Posted by timothy on from the it-couldn't-last dept.

pjfontillas writes "Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group, recently announced, 'One of the principles we have here at Bing is to constantly experiment and learn. We do this to ensure we are keeping pace with new social and technology trends, and can continue to deliver great value for our customers and advertisers. As part of this "test-and-learn" mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.' From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users. eWeek does a follow-up attempting to explain the situation in more detail."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Duh! by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Informative

    MS tried the same thing with their "passport" single-sign-on-shopping system back in the dotcom boom days. It didn't work then either. People only used it for the money and ignored it otherwise. You would think they could learn from their own mistakes. I'm surprised it took them 2 years to figure it out this time around, it must have been a massive cash suck the way people like those on fatwallet have been milking it. Funny thing about that - the only reason I even knew about bing cashback is because of fatwallet. Whatever other means of advertising they used, it sure didn't make it to my ears.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  2. Yeah, but the cashback was often your own money by aklinux · · Score: 4, Informative

    Those 35 disappointed users must have forgotten how several of the merchants that signed up to give the Bing discounts could afford to do so. Show up with a Bing cookie and the price went up. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/11/24/0112201/Bing-Cashback-Can-Cost-You-Money

  3. Re:And no one cared by Kakari · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perhaps your IT department pushed IE7/8 with an automated installation script so that it 'just worked' rather than coming up with a post-install setup wizard. Firefox could then have grabbed your search engine default. If you muck with your hosts file Windows defender will flag it as a 'potential hosts file hijack' and, again depending on your IT department, may have set it to automatically clean it. Hope that helps with the mystery (or at least leads to new ones :) !