MSN Rolls Out MSNSearchandWin Prizes
2/13/2006 08:11:00 PM
Yet another shady move in the King-of-the-Search competition! MSN has announced (undoubtedly as part of its plan to trounce Google's share of search) that users can now win prizes if they choose MSNSearchandWin.com as their search portal. More details on the announcement in SearchEngineWatch's post and MSN's official press release. Prizes include dozens of gift certificates, Netflix subscriptions, hotel stays, and more cheap miscellany.
MSN's announcement follows recent speculation about a similar Yahoo! Rewards program, which surprised many with its idea of buying users. MSN is certainly not the first site to offer rewards for search behaviors, but it is the first of the major corporate players in the search game to offer monetary rewards in an attempted buyout of user share. Amazon's A9 offers 1.57% off all Amazon purchases, but it still struggles to claim search share as it is tied to a seemingly irrelevant commercial giant. Blingo popularized the search and win idea by offering gift certificates, movie tickets, and electronics to users who search from a Google-powered portal--and it proved itself both legitimate and successful. Despite these already existing incentive programs, MSN's announcement seems like desperate strategy. Whether the goal is to increase clicks to the MSN search ads (thereby encouraging more ad buys) or to actually capture new users, paying people to use a free service rarely begets profit.
MSN's announcement follows recent speculation about a similar Yahoo! Rewards program, which surprised many with its idea of buying users. MSN is certainly not the first site to offer rewards for search behaviors, but it is the first of the major corporate players in the search game to offer monetary rewards in an attempted buyout of user share. Amazon's A9 offers 1.57% off all Amazon purchases, but it still struggles to claim search share as it is tied to a seemingly irrelevant commercial giant. Blingo popularized the search and win idea by offering gift certificates, movie tickets, and electronics to users who search from a Google-powered portal--and it proved itself both legitimate and successful. Despite these already existing incentive programs, MSN's announcement seems like desperate strategy. Whether the goal is to increase clicks to the MSN search ads (thereby encouraging more ad buys) or to actually capture new users, paying people to use a free service rarely begets profit.
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