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What's all the noise about?
Overview:
In mid 1999, a company called AllAdvantage.com came up with a new idea. Instead of paying websites to host ads that visiters would look at, AllAdvantage decided to pay websurfers to host ads on their computer screens at home. You essentially rent out a small portion (about 1 inch) of your monitor and AllAdvantage broadcasts ads on it. The AllAdvantage "viewbar" sits in this small space and takes care of all the work. The ads come automatically while you are on the Internet. Companies pay AllAdvantage money to advertise on your screen (and millions of other screens simultaneously). To compensate you for renting out your screen, AllAdvantage pays you a commission of $0.50 an hour for up to 25 hours of use per month.
This sounds like a lot of trouble for $0.50 an hour. But the deal becomes sweeter as you read more into the program. You not only get paid for your own time, you also get paid for referring friends to the program. This has been a very successful incentive for free word-of-mouth advertising. In about 6 months, AllAdvantage went from a few thousand users to almost 4 million.
The Catch
Another thing the AllAdvantage viewbar does is gather information about your web surfing. The viewbar gathers information on which sites you visit most frequenty, how long you are on the internet, etc. This information helps them to decide which ads are most appropriate for your viewbar. This information is kept in the strictest confidence and will not be used to send you junk mail at home, or junk e-mail (SPAM). They have an executive officer in charge of privacy and AllAdvantage realizes the burden of trust their users have in them.
The information gathering is stopped as soon as you close their viewbar, so you can opt out at any time.
The Press:
What does Wall Street and the press have to say about this new idea? There's been a lot of excitement over this new internet business model, click below to read some of the news clips.
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