ValerieOubre987

Pay-To-Surf (PTS) serves as a business model that became popular in the late 1990s, prior to the dot-com crash. Essentially, a company uses income from advertising placed on members' screens to pay out them for time spent surfing. For More Information, Check Out: MePrizes.

A PTS company would provide a smallish program, commonly called a "viewbar", that should be installed on a member's computer. Advertisers' banner ads were then displayed even though the member was browsing usually the internet server. Ever since the viewbar tracked websites that the user visited, the PTS company had the ability to produce targeted ads because of their advertisers. Advertisers paid the firm a limited amount (typically US$0.50) for any hour associated with a member's surfing.

Members were usually limited inside the time period per thirty days for which they will not be paid to surf (typically twenty hour). However, PTS companies also paid their members for any new user referred to this company (typically US$0.05 - US$0.10 per recruit). Thus, it was profitable obtain a member to garner as numerous referrals as possible, encouraging some users to recruit members using spam, though officially forbidden by your user's agreement. Minors, many of whom flocked to these business models since a easy way to obtain income, were required to obtain consent from a parent or legal guardian.

The foremost and most well-known PTS company was AllAdvantage.[1] It launched in March 1999 and grew to 13 million members in little while having a year in the multi-level marketing system of recruiting new members. The scheme capitalized on the notion that anyone could make money on-line without much effort.

AllAdvantage?s success attracted many imitators. At its peak, there was several dozen pay-to-surf companies. AllAdvantage had US$175 million in venture capital; its imitators didn't therefore their members were never with a small fraction of AllAdvantage's. For More Information, Check Out: Top GPT Websites.

After 18 months, even AllAdvantage ceased operations. Then, AllAdvantage had paid out over US$160 million to its members. Many constituents of smaller PTS companies were never paid when the companies stop working. By late 2001 when using the dot-com bubble collapsed, very few PTS companies remained.[2] This is not surprising since 100% of the existing revenue was taken from internet advertising, that is the area hardest hit.

Much like many Internet business models, PTS companies attracted people aiming to defraud this company away from money. First, as noted above, the companies needed to trot out spammers, often being required to terminate member accounts. Finally, utilities started appearing which allowed users to simulate surfing activity.[3][4] Some users even created mechanical mouse-moving devices which ran around their desks, i.e. "JiggyMouse".[5] Those programs and devices allowed users to get paid simply for leaving their machines on. This began an arms race amongst the PTS companies who built fraud-prevention software and fraud program developers, with each releasing increasingly sophisticated versions of their software. For More Information, Check Out: Free Xbox Live.