MSN - Live Search Offers Incentives to Beta Group to Search on Live.com

I received an email to be part of this beta group on Nov16, 2007. The goal of the campaign seems fairly innocent - get feed back on using live search. However, their motive starts to look questionable when concidering the slow growth of live search as well as the traffic it should feed to adcenter advertisers. When you take that into context you start to think, yes, MSN will need to do just about anything to get people to use live.com as and hopefully start clicking on ads while they are there. The question is, is this incentive based driven traffic being pushed at MSN advertisers?

The main element that drives successful marketing campaigns on the internet is the INITIAL MOTIVE that got the prospect online in the first place. A consumer who seeks out information via search is vastly different than one who stumbles upon it at a contextual site and is still even more foreign to any traffic driven to a site with an incentive/reward not related to the advertiser. I believe at this small scale the whole thing is negligable. However, push it to an extreme and imagine if 50% of MSN traffic was arranged through similar incentives what would you think of live.com traffic?