AllAdvantage was an internet startup launched in 1999 during the Dot Com Boom that paid people to surf the web. It worked by placing a ‘Viewbar’ that served ads at the bottom of your screen. The more time you spent surfing (while the Viewbar showed ads), the more money you’d earn. The rate was $0.5 for every hour.
AllAdvantage’s business model worked like this. People would want to get paid to surf the web. AllAdvantage would therefore have a lot of eyeballs, and companies would pay to have their ads served on the Viewbar. The money from advertisers would exceed that of payouts, resulting in profit for AllAdvantage.
This worked well at the beginning. Within the first 18 months of operation, there were 10 million users. At its peak, 4 billion ads were being served per month, and venture capital money flowed in.
AllAdvantage also had a referral program. If you directly referred someone to AllAdvantage, you’d earn $0.10 for every hour your referral spent surfing the web. If your direct referral referred someone else to AllAdvantage, you’d get paid for that too. These would be called ‘extended referrals’, and you’d earn $0.05 for every hour they spent surfing the web.
You’d sometimes see people’s AllAdvantage links in their email or message board signatures.
Soon, bots and scripts appeared specifically to game the AllAdvantage system. You couldn’t just leave your desktop on and go somewhere else while you accumulated money on AllAdvantage. It was able to determine when a user was AFK (away from keyboard). But the tech wasn’t too sophisticated back then. A simple script that kept one’s mouse moving every few seconds gave AllAdvantage the impression that the user was surfing the web. And so people could just leave AllAdvantage open, run the mouse-moving script, not look at any ads, and earn money.Â
And then later the Dot Com Crash happened. Many dot-com companies that were paying AllAdvantage to advertise on the Viewbar went out of business. Also payouts to users were becoming unsustainable as AllAdvantage was paying out far more than it was making in revenue.Â
AllAdvantage closed down in February 2001.
