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Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program
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."
They had to pay people to use their search engine?
From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users.
Snarky remark in TFS slamming MS, check.
Bing, otra vez.
Yoghurt
on the topic of MS, this website puts more spin on stories then fox news talking about obama.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I actually saved $200 off an iPod touch once, using a bing 40% ebay buy-it-now cashback and a 10% ebay coupon. Wish I could still pull things like that :)
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.
Is MS a secret muslim socialist, racist, america hater who blew up an oil well in the Gulf? Hey, I'm just asking questions!
We call it "Bung"
C|N>K
Does anyone here use bing as their primary search engine? or even at all? The times I've used it I got useless results and just ended up at google anyways. What do you guys use it for?
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
I signed up when I was going to buy a big LCD TV.
Got all the confirmation emails, or so I thought.
Signed onto Bing, "searched", bought the TV, never got the refund. Poked the seller to no avail. No way to poke Microsoft.
It was only about a $75 rebate. Still got a great price with free shipping, but I could have found that on Google too.
I made a little over $130 on this program since I always used it when I built computers for friends and family. Fortunately my new CC has rewards but Newegg isn't a member- I guess I'll take my business to Tiger Direct from now on.
They've given me just under a thousand bucks over the last year and a bit, including buying a Wii and an N900 (20% off each). It was easy to use, I didn't have any problems, and it's a shame they won't send me money to complete my shopping trips anymore, after I found what I needed with Google.
Haida Manga
Microsoft couldn't pay me to use bing. Literally.
I ask you to puzzle over the following questions:
No doubt you all know that my piece just blew a smoking crater into the voting queue because I was so floridly delusional when I wrote it.
My question is: while I was not angry with you, but merely irritated enough to point out the error of your ways to you, not only was I not delusional I was as sober as the Pope and as clear-headed as a fighter pilot the whole time I worked on it.
I took great care to write it just the way I did, that I myself regard it as the very best piece I have written in my life, while that other lucidly written and informative piece I dropped into Edit a few hours later, merely helpful and informative but not in any way important.
I'd like to take up the question of how, after making just two small edits, I might resubmit only to have you blast it to Front Page.
My psychiatrist Dr. Hugh Maquire of Truro, Nova Scotia once speculated that Schizophrenia could be cured through nothing more than weekly Psychotherapy.
I now know him to be correct. Solving the Software Problem is the textbook, with HOWTO Move a Dungeon Master to Furious Anger being the first really lucidly written chapter of that textbook.
The drugs that treat Schizophrenia can cause horrible side effects. I have experienced many of those same side effects over the years.
Tardive Dyskenesia can put you in a wheelchair. Risperdal gave me a mild but very obvious case. I continue to take it anyway, while my Psychiatrist took up watching me like a hawk as he carefully adjusted my dose up and down so I never had to take more than I absolutely required.
The case of Dystonia I got a little over a year ago leads me to bend my right foot to the right. I can relax it, but only when I apply continuous mental effort to doing so.
Eventually I asked Dr. G. if he could look into how I might avoid breaking my own ankle. He continued to prescribe Zyprexa, but also Cogentin. No more explanation required. Cogentin is just a bit more effective, but the over the counter antihistamine Benadryl works nearly as well should I run out in the middle of the night.
The whole time I was in Nova Scotia, I visited the Emergency Room on a regular basis because a phenomenon known as Brain Plasticity had made the Risperdal which was once very effective for me, almost completely usefuless.
I was floridly delusional when I was admitted to Dominical in Soquel in April 1994. All I required to be discharged four days later was two milligrams of Zyprexa.
In December 2003, I knew that I was but days away from making Bonita a widow: three, maybe four more days and The Thought Police wouldn't arrest me, but I would finally grow weary of my life on the run and turn myself in.
I turned up at the Emergency Room at the advice of the Mental Health Center receptionist. I asked the Good Doctor there if he could look into the question of how I might avoid slaying one of Truro's finest with his own service pistol.
"Glad you asked," he smiled. "But it's after hours. You're going to need to wait a while."
I smiled. "I know all about Emergency Rooms. I didn't set foot in this place until I figured out which book to bring with me."
How to Want What You Have by Cognitive Psychotherapist Timothy Miller. It's not in print anymore but not at all hard to find used. Don't let the Sun set until you've ordered your copy from Alibris.
Eventually an incredibly hot young blonde Russian Psychiatry resident from the teaching hospital in Halifax turned up. She wore a tiny red cocktail dress and black fishnet stockings.
The instant she introduced herself with a thick Slavic accent as Marina Sokolenko, I charmed the socks right off her... well, black fishnet stockings anyway... by speaking just a few words of completely unaccented Russian.
Had I ever done well at my Russian studies at Tech,
I guess I have no incentive to use Bing anymore to get stuff I was going to get without the cashback....
It's a shame there have not been any ebay bing's greater than 8% in a while or I would use them more....
I never really understood their motivation behind cash-back, especially with many sites having a discounted price for non-bing users (scam, I know) but I did appreciate the ebay buy it now discounts....
MS has now removed the only motivation to use their service in my eyes.
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell. I'm watching and thinking, "What the hell are they talking about? Is this Random Night?". Then they mention the name of the product, such as Bing or Windows 7.
In one ad, there's a guy sitting in a college class, then suddenly he's naked, then he's a caveman at a business meeting, then a naked caveman. WTF city. I seriously expected them to say, "Windows 7 and Bing will together help you locate better LSD".
Please go back to Gates and Seinfeld wiggling their asses together. At least I know which end I'm looking at.
Table-ized A.I.
I and several other people I know used bing a lot for about a week in late 2008. At the time, Microsoft was literally offering 25-35% off any buy-it-now item on ebay (I'm pretty sure from their own pocket, no way they were making 25% off those purchases).
I bought a new car stereo, camera lens, laptop, and several gifts. I saved over 500 dollars. Then, like a month later, I saw a news release where Microsoft showed off that the number of Bing users had doubled or something over the holiday period. They probably used this to gain traction in advertising and increase their collaboration with companies like Apple.
They literally paid people to use bing over a month-long period to pad some statistics! I wonder if it was worth the 500 dollars they handed me.
...after all that has become the defacto currency on the Internet... right? right?
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
There's still Club Bing. They give you points for playing word games (that do searches on words you enter). Those points can be traded in for prizes. Since I started playing I think in October I've earned a book, 2 dvds, a water bottle, a magellan car gps, and a stressball, with an electric shaver is on the way. I'm about to redeem points for a juicer and a toaster oven. I know a number of people get xbox 360 games and controllers and sell them.
You had to imagine this was going to happen, everyone I knew was using Bing for the sole purpose of getting cashback. I'd search for something on Bing (The old standby was 'cheap ps3') and then follow the link to eBay and get xx% cashback on my BiN purchases. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I don't know what that bob8766 guy way up above is talking about, I'm pretty sure he's either making that crap up or is just ignorant. Because I never saw anything like that from retailers (Also, that sounds like it'd be of fairly dubious legality!) and certainly not on eBay!
When I first tried it a couple years back, they had something ridiculous like 25% cashback on eBay, capped at $200 per purchase with a max of 3 purchases in like 90 days or something. So I got $200 cashback on my Cintiq 21UX, making it an even better deal. (Not as good a deal as the crazy scammer people who were doing stuff like buying 8 $100 bills 3 times and getting $600 free...)
This year, it was down to like 8% cashback on eBay and 1-5% on lots of big-name online stores, apparently without a cap on the number of qualifying purchases... So I offered to do all my family's tax refund shopping. :) Got something like $100 back on my little sister's new laptop and electric guitar, $80 back on my new DSLR, $40 back on my NEO-GEO arcade cabinet, and $80 back on the 8 1.5tb HDDs I got to start my new RAID array.
I actually got instant cashback on the HDDs, so that was nice, but I really liked suddenly having an extra couple hundred bucks two months later. :D
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. So long Bing, and thanks for all the free money!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Google really can't tell me much about it, and it takes forever if I try to go there.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
I was saving 8% on all transactions and getting ebay rewards at the same time. I will miss it greatly.
Jump-starting the use of your service through a glorified referral program is a solid idea, but eventually, you want to be something more than that, particularly when it comes to search.
Tweet, tweet.
Just as unsustainable as Google cash back was back a few Christmas seasons ago, where I was awarded $20 for every purchase transaction for no apparent reason. I will enjoy my $280 and $320 dual-core, wide-screen laptops courtesy of Bing.com, too. *sniff*
Kriston
It seemed like 2/3 of the posts on bargain hunting sites were focused around using this to buy stuff, and it made shopping online a real chore to make sure it went through and to wait to get the money back later. There was always an immense guilt if you didn't use it and I spent too much time crunching numbers.
Bing image search keeps loading more and more pics at the bottom, you just keep scrolling down. You never need to click to go to the "next page". It's great.
Actually, they are both dead, which is too bad. I loved their Road to Morocco. Needless to say, they both lived longer than Microsoft.
Using anything Microsoft is like using a cactus butt plug. According to Microsoft, it's great if it fits and too bad if it doesn't.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
User IDs are up to 1.7M now? How did that happen?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...we have many cashback sites that give you a cut of the money from you clicking their affiliate links, usually a percentage of the amount you spend. There are many of them so it's clearly a viable business model, and as a customer it's brilliant. I've got the impression that Bing worked differently and I've got the impression that in the US you don't have cashback sites like we do, am I correct?
...that in the Chinese, "bing" means poison?
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
When was it? They used to advertise heavily on TV. It positioned itself as a search service, and the pitch was that every time you used it for a search, you were automatically getting entered for free into a sweepstakes. The obnoxious ad showed a "plain-folks" lady, presumably at work, asking sotto voce "If I use it at work and I win, does my boss get the money?" and the announcer saying enthusiastically "No, you get the money," and the lady replying "Good to know."
Of course I tried it, and the free sweepstakes feature was marred by the fact that it couldn't find its behind with both hands and a flashlight.
It still exists, but seems to have positioned itself as "Play games! Earn coins! Win prizes." The word "search" does not even appear on its home page, although it is apparently possible to perform a genuine Google search from the site, while, I suppose, accruing infinitesimal chances of obtaining something of value--I'm too lazy to figure it out--at http://www1.iwon.com/home/search/search_simple/
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I had used bing to purchase new kitchen appliances... we spent about 2 or 3 thousand, and expected some cash back, but never got... sent several emails, filled out forms, no one ever contacted us.
mattlevinson.info
Wow, thanks for explaining that one. Although that was the expressed purpose of the cashback plan, I probably wouldn't have gotten it without this insightful post.
BING... yeayeayeayeayea I do mean you
By using a combination of key words (a bunch from http://www.slickdeals.net/) on bing.com (especially during the holiday season), I was able to save between 5% to 30% on a bunch of items. I knew M$ was trying to buy results and did not care - $1500 cash back in addition to more from rebates and sometimes coupons which worked with cash back is more money in my pocket....
As for the person who says it costs more to buy thru bing - I don't think so - there are some items which go on sale at specific merchants and then become awesome deals with high BCB percentages... some recent purchases: i7 980X for $780 delivered, X58 Classified 3-way SLI for $321 (includes $30 rebate), 8% on everything purchased from ebay, LCD TVs, Canon EOS 7D combo deal, newegg deals, etc. - the program has saved me a lot of money since November of 2009. Wish I had used it when it first came out.
Check out slickdeals site and you will see the posts which people have made to help people save money on all sorts of items... Yesterday it was 30% off your purchase from endless shoes (Amazon's shoe site). There are good deals to be had if you know what other places are charging.
Sad day seeing Bing go. The model still works. All the more reason to compare the various other cash back options now. I typically check with www.cashreporter.com