Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer discussed Bing Cashback (starts at 38:15) at yesterday’s Search Marketing Expo – West, and he admits it hasn’t been the success that they would have hoped.
“Cashback has been interesting. I would say it has worked; it hasn’t worked fantastically in the sense that it has completely changed the economic structure of the business, for the user or anybody else…but it certainly has had positive results. So, I’d expect to see us continue Cashback, continue to kinda rethink it, morph it, try to do some things around the basic Cashback concept to try to make it a more potent and important thing for the merchant as well as for the user.”
In other words, while Microsoft intends to keep Bing Cashback, at least for now, we’re likely to see some sort of revamp of the program in the months ahead.
I cashed out my Bing Cashback account over the weekend and had my payment in my PayPal account on Monday (see below). Hope that any changes they make to the program involve expanding the program, for example, to include more big-name national merchants, rather than limiting it in some way.
