Review: Microsoft Rewards (Bing)

Attribution: Author’s Own Work

Caption: The above picture is a screenshot from the Bing Search app on my Samsung Galaxy S6 Active. Just tap on the magnifying glass in the center of the screen and start searching like you would with any other search engine to earn points.

Microsoft Rewards (sometimes referred to as Bing Rewards) is one of the first GPT websites I started using several years ago. It’s a simple way to make a few extra dollars every month. It requires you to do a few things you might be doing anyways…as well as a few things you wouldn’t do otherwise. So is Microsoft Rewards worth adding to your GPT repertoire? Read on to find out.

What Is It and How Does it Work?

Microsoft Rewards is a Microsoft program where users complete tasks to earn points. These points can then be redeemed for special perks and gift cards.

You can earn points in several ways, all of which will be presented to you on your Dashboard. There you will find:

- Daily Set: This usually consists of three components. First there is the “fact” or “did you know” portion where all you have to do is click on the box to earn 10 points. Second, there is a daily poll where you can answer a “which do you prefer…” type of question. This will earn you another 10 points. Finally, there is the daily quiz. These show up randomly, but are available roughly every other day or two. Depending on the length of the quiz, you can earn 10, 30 or 50 points. The good thing about this quiz is that you can keep guessing until you get the right answer. The bad thing is that some of the quizzes (usually the 50 point ones) have questions where you have to put the answers in the correct order. Depending on the speed of your computer and Internet connection, this can be a slower process than you might want. On days where you don’t have a daily quiz, you’ll usually have a “fact” or “did you know” box to click on for 10 points.

- Bing App: You can earn up to 100 points each day for searches you do through the Bing search app. You get 5 points for each search you do and your search terms can be anything, including gibberish.

- Bing Search: Generally speaking, you’ll have the ability to earn up to 150 points for every search you do through the Bing Search website on your computer. You get 5 points for each search and just like the app. You also get credit for meaningless searches as well as legitimate ones.

- Shop & Earn: Participants can earn up to 10 points for every dollar they spend at the Microsoft Store on the Xbox. I’ve personally never used this as I stopped playing my Xbox several years ago. And when I did, I specifically avoided purchasing anything from Microsoft beyond my annual Xbox Live Gold membership. But that’s a topic for another blog post on another type of website…

- Microsoft Edge: You can use the Bing search function through the Microsoft Edge web browser for an extra 20 points a day (limited to 600 points per month). I tried this and I couldn’t get it to credit, so I don’t mess with it, but I think I’m an exception or I just picked a bad day to try it out.

- Other Activities: These can include additional “fact” or “did you know” boxes on the Dashboard. Some of these will also serve as an “FYI” opportunity from Microsoft to explain one of its promotions, new products or services. Depending on the day, you may get one or two, allowing you to earn an extra 10 or 20 points. Other times, these other activities will be opportunities to earn points by downloading a Microsoft game or complete a goal or milestone within a game. These can sometimes be significant, resulting in thousands of bonus points.

- Emails: Every few days to a few weeks you’ll get an email with a quiz you can take, as well as more links you can click on for more points. These emails typically provide another 50 points if you click on all the links and take the quiz. Like the other quizzes, you can keep on guessing until you get the answer right.

Special Bonuses

Every once in a while you’ll be eligible to earn more than your usual allotment of points. These bonuses can come in several different varieties.

First, Microsoft will temporarily raise the daily limit on how many points you can earn through daily searches on your computer. For example, a few months ago the 150 daily point cap was raised to 300.

Second, there is a streak bonus. Microsoft will keep track of each day you complete your Daily Set. After going a few days in a row, you’ll get a bonus number of points. This bonus will vary depending on how long the streak is, but in my experience, it maxes out at 150 points (and my streak is over 100 days right now). The number of days needed to earn the streak bonus goes up over time. At first, you’ll only need a streak of a few days. But that will rise as your streak continues.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll earn 15 points for each day of your streak (up to about 150 total bonus points). So for a 3 day streak, you’ll get 45 bonus points. For a 5 day streak, you’ll get a 75 point streak. The precise streak requirement is arbitrarily and randomly set by Microsoft and is subject to change at any time.

Third, during a particular milestone, like a 1, 2 or 3 year anniversary for being a Bing or Microsoft Rewards user, you’ll be able to click on a box on your Dashboard to get a 200 or 500 point one-time bonus. These are really nice but are very rare. These only show up 1 or 2 times a year, at most.

Fourth, there are virtual scratch-off cards or other similar “contests” where you can redeem your points for a chance to win points or prizes, like a Microsoft Surface or an Xbox. I do these on occasion when I’m feeling lucky. I usually lose, but sometimes I’ll make back my points or come out slightly on top on occasion. It’s basically gambling with virtual points for more virtual points or real prizes.

Microsoft Rewards Levels

New users start off with Level 1. The biggest difference between Level 1 and Level 2 is the amount of points the person can earn in a day. At Level 1, the user is limited to 50 points per day through the Bing Search, whether it’s through the app or the website. After advancing to Level 2, users can earn up to 250 points through the Bing Search website and app.

To get to Level 2, a user must earn at least 500 points per month. When I started using Microsoft Rewards, there was another requirement that the user also redeem at least one gift card to reach Level 2. I’m not sure if that requirement still exists, though.

How Much Can I Make with Microsoft Rewards?

That depends on how much you’re willing to spend or gamble! But assuming you avoid anything that requires you to gamble your points or spend real money and you’re at Level 2, you can expect to earn about 300 points per day. This is roughly the equivalent of 30 cents.

How Do I Get Paid?

You simply click on the Redeem tab and browse the rewards available. As I write this, users can choose to donate their points, enter various sweepstakes, get Skype credit, renew or start an Xbox Live membership or get one of many gift cards. Popular gift cards include:

- Starbucks

- Burger King

- Target

- Walmart

- Amazon.com

- REI

- Sephora

These gift cards only come in the $5 or $10 denominations and cost 5,250 or 10,500 points, respectively.

How Long Does it Take to Receive Payouts?

It may take new users a day or two to receive the gift card in their inbox, but after ordering a few, they will arrive instantaneously. This is really nice and is only matched by Reward Stash and instaGC (there might be more, but these are the only two I have experience with that provide instantaneous gift cards).

Possible Issues

On occasion, users won’t get credit for their searches or a quiz will malfunction in that users can’t advance or they complete the quiz, but don’t get credit.

Another issue I’ve experienced is having multiple accounts per household. My wife and I each have our own account and when we both tried to cash out our points for a gift card, my wife’s order was put on hold (but mine went through). After explaining to Microsoft that we were separate individuals running our own Microsoft Rewards accounts, they let the order go through. But this happened several times until everything automatically worked normally. So Microsoft does honor multiple accounts per household as long as they are attached to legitimate users, but there might be a few hiccups you’ll have to deal with until things move along smoothly.

Multiple Accounts

As mentioned above, multiple accounts per household work, but hiccups might result. I don’t know the exact terms of service, but I think I remember it allowing multiple accounts as long as they were used by real individuals in the household. So if there are four people in your household who each have their own Microsoft Rewards account, that should work. But again, when you try to redeem your points, don’t be surprised if one or more orders are held up until you can explain things to Microsoft Customer support.

Tricks

When I said you can search for anything to get 5 points, I mean it. Your search term can be a long string of random letters and it will still earn you 5 points. I’ve read that this can result in account banning, but it hasn’t happened to me. But then again, I do legitimately use Bing for searches online on my laptop on occasion (Google is still my go to search engine until they bring back Lycos or Excite) and Bing is my primary search engine on my personal phone. I also click on one of the suggested news links when I see something that catches my attention.

You will also get search credit for searching for the same thing each day. I’ve read about people saving searches in a bookmark folder, then opening the entire bookmark folder at once to complete multiple searches at the same time. I’m sure this is in violation of the terms of service, but people claim it works without issue. The one catch is that it takes a while to create the bookmarks and place them in folders.

I’ve also read that people can do a search, get their 5 points, then click through the pictures or news links and continue to get more search points for that. From my personal experience I haven’t been able to do this. I only get Bing Search points from typing in actual searches.

Conclusion

For you serious GPT users out there, I think Microsoft Rewards is definitely something you should do. It only takes a few minutes to earn about $10 per month. But for those who don’t have the time or inclination to go out of their way to complete GPT tasks, then perhaps this is something to skip, as there is no passive earning potential.