In the middle of 1999 a new phenomenon appeared out of nowhere. Someone finally realized that if advertisers will pay to show ads, then why not pay people to display them on their computers?
AllAdvantage was one of the first companies to put this concept into practice. They created a viewbar which was large enough to display a banner ad on the bottom or top of a screen. The ad changed periodically, and as long as a person was attached to the internet he would receive credit for the ads.
They made this simple concept a little more complicated because they monitored the sites that each of their customers was visiting to build up a profile. This allowed them to tailor the advertising experience to each person, and thus charge more for the display of banners.
The program became very big very fast. AllAdvantage (and it's later copy-cats) had a big problem: in order to make the concept work they had to get a very large number of people to sign up for it very quickly. They had to do this to attract large numbers of advertisers, and that in turn enabled them to get vast amounts of financing.
The method they chose to get people to join very fast was to create a pyramid scheme. You joined AllAdvantage, then tried to get as many people to join as you could. They, in turn, got as many people to join as they could. This continued for many levels downwards. Each level made money off the levels below it.
Thus, the people who got into the program early and managed to pull together a huge downline probably made quite a bit of money. Virtually everyone else made a few dollars here and there, if they made anything at all.
One of the problems that quickly surfaced was spam. AllAdvantage and it's copy-cat cousins generated so much spam that many newsgroups were forced to add automated robots to filter out all messages referring the program. I found this out quite by accident when I created a signature for my newsgroups postings which included the word "AllAdvantage" and my referral id. I was reported by a robot to my ISP for spamming a newsgroup, even though I was doing nothing of the sort. Naturally, I learned from this experience and now do no affiliate advertising of any kind in my signature file.
Cheating became a huge problem also. What happened here is many enterprising people decided they could generate more money if they could display the bar on an idle computer screen. AllAdvantage didn't allow the screen to be idle (if someone is not actually viewing a banner it is even more useless than it already is), which caused cheating programs to be invented. These pretended to be people working on a computer.
This resulted in a war (literally) between AllAdvantage and the cheaters. AllAdvantage would release a new bar and the cheaters would have a new program out in a day or so. This war went on right until AllAdvantage was dead, embalmed and buried.
All of these things combined to reduce the effectiveness of programs like AllAdvantage. However, the killing blows came as banner ads began to fall in effectiveness until finally very few advertisers wanted to use their service. In 1999 it was not uncommon for a good banner to pull a 4% to 6% click-thru rate - by the end of 2000 a good rate was anything over .1%!
And thus at the beginning of the year 2001 AllAdvantage announced it was no longer in operation. Thank God all of these silly companies with their asinine pseudo-money-making ideas are finally dying. Let's just hope the all of them follow AllAdvantage into the grave.
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Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.