Paid to surf
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Pay to surf is a business model that became popular in the late 1990s, prior to the dot com crash. Essentially it was a legal variation on the classic pyramid scheme, borrowing a lot of ideas from multi-level marketing. The first, and most well-known pay to surf company was AllAdvantage. The scheme capitalized on the notion that anyone could make money on the internet without much effort.
A company would release a small program, commonly called a "viewbar" that would be installed on a user's PC and dispay banner ads while he or she is browsing the web. For every hour of surfing, the company would pay a small amount (typically US$0.50) at the end of the month. More importantly, the user would also be paid a smaller amount (typically US$0.05 - US$0.10) for each member that user referred. Thus, it was profitable to recruit as many referals as possible, often encouraging spam (although officially forbidden by the users agreement). Additionally, the viewbar would monitor and track the websites the user visited, enabling it to deliver targeted ads. There would also be a limit (typically 20 hours) on the amount of time allowed to surf per month. In turn, the company would make money from advertisers who would purchase advertising from them.
The pay to surf model quickly ran into severe trouble. First, as noted above, the companies had to deal with spammers, often having to terminate user accounts. There were also legal problems with users under the age of 18, many of whom flocked to these programs as an easy source of income. Finally, utilities started appearing on the web which allowed users to simulate surfing activity, usually by moving the mouse and clicking on the ads from time to time. This allowed users to get paid simply for leaving their machines on and was obviously a pitfall for advertisers. This started an arms race between the pay to surf companies and mouse-mover program developers, with the latter releasing increasingly sophisticated versions of their software. Some users even created mechanical mouse-moving devices, making them effectively impossible to detect.
At the peak, there were several dozen pay to surf companies, with new ones appearing almost every week. This led to an another interesting phenomenon of users running multiple viewbars on their desktops simultaneously to multiply their profits. Coupled with a mouse-moving program this could in fact turn a user's PC into an autonomous money-making machine, earning close to minimum wage (at least for a few hours a month). Of course, as in any pyramid scheme, those at the top with 1000s of referrals were earning significant amounts of money.
The pay to surf companies disappeared just as quickly as they had appeared after the dot com crash. This is not surprising, because 100% of the revenue came from internet advertising which was the area hardest hit. Most users were never paid as the companies shut down. As of 2005, there are effectively no more serious pay to surf programs, however, the concept lives on in new incarnations such as "Free iPod" schemes.
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