Trying out Microsoft Rewards

2023-08-22 – #Random #Finances

How it works
My Experience
- Bugs 🐛
Conclusion

So I often heard from people the passing remark that bing is so bad that Microsoft will even pay you to use it. And I would love to get paid for internet searches.

The concept is easy: You do things that Microsoft likes to see you doing. For that you get Microsoft reward points. If you collect enough points, you can redeem them for anything else.

r/MicrosoftRewards is especially notable for its doom-posting. They fear that this epic program will slowly end.

At first I was a little overwhealemd as Microsoft reward points can be a science in themselves. But when you got a lot of questions about how to get points and what to redeem and so on, you will quickly run across the epicenter of that rabbit hole: The unaffiliated subreddit where all information and experiences are being collected. So I can recommend going there and checking out what they are up to.

How it works

Prerequisites

Warning

Microsoft understandably will not hesitate to suspend your account if you don’t follow their rules

You need a Microsoft account and sign up for the rewards program… duh. Further:

You are only allowed to open one account per individual or household
You need to reside within the supported regions, you are not allowed to confuse your true IP address or location through for example a VPN
You need to provide accurate account information: E-Mail, phone number and your true name
You are not allowed to use bots or the like

Ways to gain points

There are a couple of ways to gain points but I’m only aware of the following:

Bing Searches
Edge Browser usage
Clicking on reward tiles on the Microsoft Rewards page
Achieving stuff in some games for XBox or PC

How many points each activity will gain you, depends on where you live.

While I was trying it out, I was only making use of Bing searches, Edge browser usage and clicking on the reward tiles. If I maxed out these vectors on a good day, then Edge usage got me 12 points, Bing usage on desktop 90 and Bing usage on mobile another 60. That sums up to 162 points. Clicking tiles varies but it is roughly 50 points per day. Summed up, normally it was possible to get above 200 points per day.

What is a reward tile

I don’t know the real name of them. I’m refering to these tiles:

Figure 1. The daily set consists of at least 30 points

Most of the time, you click on them and they will bing something for you and give you points. Sometimes they will ask you to do a puzzle which you can skip. Sometimes you need to do a small quiz but those will get you 30 points instead. Sometimes there is a opinion poll on some stupid topic like what holiday destination you like more (and then listing two you have never been to).

Figure 2. There are more reward tiles than the daily set

Redeeming points

Generally, 1000 reward points equal roughly 1 dollar. But that is not quite true. The real exchange rates depends on how you decide to cash out. I compare a couple of ways of cashing out here:

Yes, I sat down and calculated the exchange rates between euros, microsoft reward points and robux.

Product	Price	Points	€/Point
5€ Microsoft gift card	5€	4650	0.00108
5€ Amazon gift card	5€	7500	0.00067
1 month game pass	10€	7750	0.00129
1000 robux	15€	15000	0.001

The best way is to let the money stay at Microsoft. That is why, if you check what people use the program for on the subreddit, you will see that it is mostly for getting their game pass, an XBox controller or the like. All of which are things that Microsoft offers which is why the exchange rates are favorable.

The issue is of course that if you don’t need a game pass and want some amazon gift cards instead, you end up with a exchange rate twice as bad.

My Experience

On day one, I have some things in my notes that I thought were funny. For example, I got points for clicking on the "Test the new Bing"-tile. All this tile did however was to give me a popup that this feature is only available for Edge browsers and then rewarded me 10 points. Looking back at this, this ended up happening about every second day.

After only three days I got to over 1000 points. Granted, I was more enthusiastic at the start and made sure to always max out on Bing search points and the like.

Figure 3. Of course on days on which you barely use your computer (here Thursday), you also won’t get many points. In this case I only opened edge for some website on mobile.

After 20 days, I had enough points to redeem a 5€ Microsoft gift card. This means I roughly made 250 points per day up until this point. If we calculated that into real money it would amount to 61€ of amazon money per year or 5€ per month.

With "it worked pretty straight forward", I mean: You click on "redeem", it then sends you a code by SMS, to verify. Afterwards, it sends you an E-Mail with a security code. That security code can then be put into your amazon directly

After one month and one day, I had more than 7500 points and thus enough points to redeem 5€ for amazon. Which I did. It worked pretty straight forward.

Bugs 🐛

Most of the Microsoft stuff was very bug-ridden for me. For one, the mobile Microsoft Rewards page is almost unusable. On a desktop the site already feels a little clunky but on mobile I feel like it loses its functionality.

Furthermore, bing also needs some more work. Sometimes it will just fail during its search and display an error page. I think I’m running into actual downtime there because when that happens searching something else will also display that error page. The only way to fix this is to wait (and use a different search engine in the meantime). That much downtime for a search engine is pretty unacceptable.

Figure 4. I’m not the only one with that issue

Sometimes after searching, it will freeze the scrolling and thus leave me with one page of results only. For most of the time however, I didn’t mind the supposedly worse search results on bing. Only the things that straight up got in my way.

Conclusion

5€ per month for using a different search engine and clicking random tiles sounds like a fair deal to me (a poor student) so I will keep doing it for now. Also bing AI comes in handy every now and then.