Pay-to-surf Programs
<div class="IPBDescription">All extinct?</div> A twang of greed clicked into my mind earlier this weekend and I suddenly remembered all those pay-to-surf programs that used to be around. Hey, I managed cash about 40$ back when alladvantage was still king, (I <b>nearly</b> lost my chance to cash in; two months later the payout minimum went nuts and then shutdown).
I just decided to browse around to see if any of the pay-to-surf programs were still alive, and managed to find one left standing. In fact, I think I originally left Spedia with a pretty **** e-mail back when I was in grade eight...
Surprisingly enough, I had forgotten my past folly and rejoined Spedia again; my "terminated" account was resurrected and the points I accumulated back in the year of 2000 were still there! But every single attempt to check my balance showed a negative. and the ad bar I downloaded didn't display a single ad, (I thought it was just Proximitron doing it's job at first, but I think there's nothing left for them to show). Snooping through information on other sites, it seems like Spedia died as well; they just left their site up to **** people off. So I ended up terminating my account again...
But just remembering all this brings back memories... While in the entire lifetime of using these accursed programs I managed to score only one cheque, I'm wondering... are any of these programs still around anymore? I'm itching in joining again...
I just decided to browse around to see if any of the pay-to-surf programs were still alive, and managed to find one left standing. In fact, I think I originally left Spedia with a pretty **** e-mail back when I was in grade eight...
Surprisingly enough, I had forgotten my past folly and rejoined Spedia again; my "terminated" account was resurrected and the points I accumulated back in the year of 2000 were still there! But every single attempt to check my balance showed a negative. and the ad bar I downloaded didn't display a single ad, (I thought it was just Proximitron doing it's job at first, but I think there's nothing left for them to show). Snooping through information on other sites, it seems like Spedia died as well; they just left their site up to **** people off. So I ended up terminating my account again...
But just remembering all this brings back memories... While in the entire lifetime of using these accursed programs I managed to score only one cheque, I'm wondering... are any of these programs still around anymore? I'm itching in joining again...
Comments
Ah, I remember these. Used to love slapping these programs on the computer used by the rest of the family, and then get checks of about $30-40 sent to me each month.
In four words, these services/programs can be described as "genious legalized pyramid schemes." You'd sign up, download their computer program, and run it whenever you were online (most allowed you to minimize/disable/close them for fullscreen games, but you wouldn't be getting time on your clock.) Running the program meant you were <i>volunteering</i> to get positively hammered by bannerads taking up a good space of the bottom or top of your screen -- about 1 inch height and the entire way across. Not to mention your bandwidth was constricted by downloading bannerads constantly. But the plus side was that for every minute spent with the annoyance, you got a couple cents. Consider how much you spend browsing your mail, these forums, and so on; that could be a dollar or few per day just for doing what you normally do.
The real money started coming in when you pulled your friends into the services, and instructed them to mention your name when they joined. That way you'd count as the person who "referred" them, and whenever <i>they</i> got money, <i>you</i> got some money too (like a commission). Depending on the service you might also get money for people on the next couple levels down in the pyramid, too.
The end result is that the earlier you signed up, the more money you made by doing absolutely nothing. Some of the people in the top 10 list were earning multiple-thousand dollar per year salaries, and had to give extra personal info to the company for income tax filing reasons.
The problem with them all started when someone had the genious idea of leaving the computer online with the bannerads 24/7. The companies then used the auto-update feature of their programs to add in a new feature like a screensaver: detect when the user is idle for a minute, and act as if it had been minimized (stop counting time). That's when someone came up with the idea of making a program that would move your mouse for you, even if you weren't in your house; newer revisions of it would even click on links if it happened to hover over one in IE, so it seemed like actual internet traffic.
The pay-to-surf companies ended up wasting so much time trying to detect who was cheating and who wasn't. When the research piled in that people rarely ever clicked on the bannerads to begin with (how often do you click a website ad?) they just gave up.
e/ Marik what is your avatar may I ask?
Marik is part of a secret organization that basically does all the Emperors dirty work (Star Wars).
In the game TIE Fighter, you could be part of this organization and those are the tattoos that you got for doing good work.
<span style='color:orange'>Already sent him a PM explaining the whole thing and trying to get him to try out the game, but thanks for knowing and caring <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->. Now, back on topic! *cue the whip noises!*</span>
I used to love those pay-to-surf programs. Just about everyone I knew in highschool was in on it and we had a pretty intricate web of references so money was coming in pretty good. Too bad it all came to an end though. Free money is nice.
They had frikin custom programs made to create dummy accounts and upload files, and even another program that would create hashes for the URLs and automatically download a specified list of files much like a download manager.
It was pretty crazy, not to mention the dozens of other flash in the pan hosting providers out there that provided ad-free hosting. Of course, they all got shut down and the DPPH forums were temporarily closed due to legal threats.
Many of the pay-to-surf programs went under simply because a) no one used them enough to actually make it worthwhile or b) people would constantly create programs to circumvent the ads and still make money. And besides, these days we have those wonderful Flash ads, full screen popups, and embedded video ads. What joy.