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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadSeriously, 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.
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).
http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/whatever-happened-to-msns-adse...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com
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.
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...
Translation: shopping remains one of the most easily-monetized tasks people engage in while using search.
I actually bought into it. It seemed like it was working.
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.