I can see how it’s difficult to believe, but a lot of small business owners do put a lot of value on it.
Especially in the early days, forums need to capture a few regular posters to build the community. Those few critical users might come from any source, including Bing or Yahoo. If you only have 10 visitors per day, then losing 10% of your traffic might include one of those early enthusiasts. (The numbers are just arbitrary examples.) Sometimes just a few users are very important for a site’s growth and culture.
Sure, my web stats show that some of the regulars on one site return because they come back via a search from one of those Bing-powered sources. For example, users who arrive via DuckDuckGo spend twice as much time (over 8 minutes) on my site as the average user.
Bing powers Yahoo, which is much more popular in places like Taiwan and Japan. DuckDuckGo also uses Bing, among other sources. An example where it could matter is a travel site. Some of the users might be from countries where they are using Yahoo or they have Windows 10 and didn’t change the default settings. They might no longer find Discourse sites when they search the Web.
Bing might not seem like a major source of traffic, but I help a lot of people with computer use (via organizing a programming club in Berkeley) and it’s surprising how many of the Windows 10 users end up on Bing one way or another.
Also, a lot of small business owners just love to show up in search engine results regardless of the effects on their businesses.
Just some friendly, constructive feedback…