"I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination." - David Ogilvy

Live Search CashBack

By Tommy Leung on 05/22/2008 in Marketing

There were flutterings yesterday about Microsoft’s new search initiative to give people money for completing transactions with Live Search. Bill Gates has officially announced the plan at Microsoft Advance ’08.

Microsoft’s new business model for search, coined Live Search CashBack, will basically give the consumer the fee that the advertiser would have paid Microsoft in a cost-per-action model. Under this plan, Microsoft is not going to make any money on the advertising. One would have to conclude that this is predominantly a strategy to steal users away from Google and Yahoo!

Gates proclaimed that “we can look back and say search started to get a fair bit more competitive and we can look back to this announcement.” I welcome more competition in search. As a business, Google has impressed me at every turn and I am curious to know how Google will combat this. No one knows how successful this model may or may not be but as I mentioned previously, I will certainly try it out.

By Tommy Leung
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Reader's Comments

  1. John Jones | October 25th, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    It’s a shame they don’t offer cashback for the UK market. Howver i tend to use http://www.cashbackbay.com for the UK.

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