Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Microsoft Rewards value reduced by around a third.

Microsoft offers users of their Bing service the ability to earn points by using Bing for searches.  You get three points per search. Microsoft makes it easier to earn points by providing links to trending news and also each day offers bonus tasks.

Each day you can earn up to 60 points via mobile searches, 90 points via desktop searches, and an additional 12 points if you're using Microsoft Edge on the desktop. you get three points per search. That's a daily total of 162 points. The also often three bonus searches giving 10 points each. These appear most days or perhaps every couple of days. There's also Super Quizzes offering 30 points offered every few days taking a couple of minutes to answer. Sometimes there's an even bigger special bonus such as checking out a Microsoft product. Let's however look at what 162 points a day is worth.

Until recently you could convert 3600 points to a Microsoft $5 Gift Card. You'd add the gift card to your account and had three months to use the value of the gift card before the amount expires. Now you need 4,750 points for a Microsoft $5 Gift Card. That's a reduction in value of a third.

Earning points is fairly easy but time consuming. Supposedly you'll earn points for doing searches you do now, but if you did that you'll earn very little points each day. Say you did 10 searches a day you'd get 30 points a day, which would be a little over $10 a year. If you could earn the 162 points regularly available a day that would be around $60 a year. That's a lot of effort for not much return.

To be fair there's probably not much in your searches for Microsoft either. They'd probably rely on advertisers' ads appearing in the search result to make money themselves.

TIP. From what I've read it looks like Xbox Gift Cards work the same as the as Microsoft Gift Cards. If this is true you should be able to purchase a $5 Xbox Gift Card for 3,600 points rather than 4,750 points for a Microsoft Gift Card. I'll give that a go and let you know how I go. UPDATE: 22/06/2018 Points needed for Xbox Gift Card now also increased.

I wasn't too pleased when Microsoft recently devalued to value of points without notice, but that's life with the big companies.

Kelvin Eldridge

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