Microsoft, a company known for amassing boatloads of money, announced Friday that it will be ending its futile efforts to give some of that money away. The Bing Cashback program, which shared advertising revenue with Bing customers, did not generate enough interest, according to the Bing blog.

“In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for,” Yusuf Mehdi explained on the Bing blog.

If you were one of the people who decided to get some of your hard-earned money back from Microsoft, you have until 9:00 PM PST on July 30th to earn any cash back on Bing shopping. You will, however, be able to redeem any money made from cashback after that date, and Microsoft will continue to provide 12 months of customer service in case you want to complain about Bing Cashback ending.

Is this an indication that things are not going well for Bing in their attempts to topple Google? Probably not, but comments on the blog post indicated general disappointment. Apparently, many people started using Bing specifically because of the cashback program. To alleviate some concerns, Bing has promised to redirect the efforts and money spent on Bing Cashback into other programs for users and advertisers, although they gave no specific examples of what programs they have on the horizon.

Tags: Bing, Bing cashback, Microsoft