AffiliateBOT

It's a good thing when you try different things to produce better results and although their latest tactic which is to BRIBE search users to use their search engine can provide initial results, in the long run, there is a very big negative side effect to this.

Just to explain what's going on, go to Microsoft Live Search cashback main page and you can do a search for a product that you want to buy. Every product that is listed has a discount attached to it. So users who want to get a 'deal' with every purchase can go directly there and buy stuff.

So in reality, Microsoft just became an affiliate of thousands of merchants. They're operating a coupon site with emphasis on the search function. I presume that they'll intend to integrate the cashback results with their main search engine in the near future. We can even say that at some level, they're providing incentivizated traffic.

Problems to this is:-

1. Don't they own an affiliate network and if they become an affiliate, won't it be competing with these affiliates for referral sales/leads.
2. If this takes off, merchants should realise that by bribing customers to purchase, in the long run, customers are gonna expect to be bribed for EVERY purchase. When the search engine used to be a good source of traffic that can bring in maximum profit (without giving commissions/cashbacks), big merchants who use to get 90% of sales from the 'free' search traffic may see that percentage dwindling. If for example it drops to 60%, with 30% going to cashback search, they'll end up losing ALOT MORE MONEY.

So Microsoft is actually transfering affiliates & merchant's wealth to the customer to get more people using their search engine. Big merchants and ALL affiliates are at a disadvantage in the long run. Considering that if this works, Microsoft might get to pressure merchants to pay them to be listed (currently all cashback profit is totally transfered to customer).

There is a group that may benefit. Small time merchants, new program owners, merchants with sites that don't rank well in SERPs. They may rank higher in this cashback search site, and get more visibility... for the moment.

It's a good strategy on Microsoft's part. Merchants are pressured into participating because they don't want to lose out on the potential sales that can be generated from the cashback search site, and they especially don't want their competitors to grab sales that could have been theirs. As more merchants participate and increase the inventory, more users will use it. And why not, when the customer doesn't have anything to lose. Google won't do this as they're highly dependant on their advertisers and wouldn't want to mess with their advertiser's profits by being a competitor, unlike Microsoft which generates revenue from other sources.

So there is this danger. Microsoft if they focus on this, and I mean really make this a priority, they could potentially do away with PPC advertising and pushing CPA to the front whereby Microsoft will dominate. Considering that they're already getting advertisers in.

This may be extreme imagination but think about this unlikely but possible scenario:-

Microsoft gets fed up with competing with Google and affiliate networks. They decide that they're not going to be brokering ads between advertisers and publishers and faciliting channels for advertisers to list ads in search engines like how google does it with Adword. They're also fed up with brokering ads on affiliate's sites/blogs (Adsense). They decide to GO DIRECT with advertisers. They'll get more and more people to use their search engine by bribing them, giving freebies (and why not, they're many times richer than competitors) and other stuff that only they can pull of with their mountains of resources. It's no longer, doing a search for a product I want to buy on google, and try to see which site in the serps offers it (and hoping that I don't waste time visiting non-related sites that are just better SEOed), visiting site after site. And perhaps buying from a specific site or having to go through an ad in a blog or through another affiliate landing page.

It'll be that even if a visitor sees an ad on blogs or google that alerts them to a product or service that they'll be interested in, they'll be doing a search in Microsoft's cashback site. Even if the visitor initially visited the advertisers site, they're gonna double back to the Live Search cashback site and buy through it cuz the product gets cheaper.

Whenever anyone plans to buy something, they just go direct to Microsoft's wonderful cashback site (with maximized commissions that are totally transfered to customers), with huge inventory. More and more users flock to the search engine that provides the BIGGEST BRIBE (and why not, there's no point being loyal to google) to the point that no advertiser can afford to not be listed in Microsoft's search engine. Microsoft robs google and other affiliate network's of their earnings.

And that folks is how Microsoft succeeded in ruling the computing world, both software and the internet. With the additional revenue and resources at their disposable, they branched out to other industries and dominated them. It took awhile, but Microsoft finally conquered the world, where it should have been Google.

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