Firm dredges up Alladvantage model

WAY BACK IN THE YEAR 2000, when we weren't eating meals in the form of pills, wearing skin-tight lycra and riding hoverboards behind flying cars, my university friends were keen (ab)users of what epitomises the brilliance of most first generation internet bubble business plans: AllAdvantage (.com, of course).

The concept was simple: spy on web users' viewing habits, force feed them targeted adverts, then pay them for the number of hours they use the internet with the AllAdvantage ViewBar open. Or the number of hours they left their computer switched on with utilities that automatically wiggled the mouse for them, in many peoples' cases.

This could add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to the savvy, especially those who got their friends to sign up too. Curiously enough, the company went bust in mid 2000, losing their investors around $200 million.

Perhaps as a sign either of the imminent apocalypse, or more likely that the Internet bubble is firmly back with us again, the founders have come right back at us with a new, completely different, Web 2.0 idea. So presumably involving blogs, XML, and with the word "beta" somewhere.

The new concept: pay people to surf the internet, monitored by an application which force feeds them adverts, known as a ViewBar. Er, sound familiar so far? Well it's now called Agloco.

Here come the catches: instead of cash, you are "paid" in Agloco shares. That's right. And, amusingly, you can only claim for up to 5 hours per month. 5 hours a month? I suspect most readers of the Inq do twice that per day.

In time, the theory is that dividends will be paid, as the company becomes profit-making, and that eventually it will float on the London stock exchange's AIM (alternative investment market), and your shares will be worth millions.

Here's my personal take on it: It was a particularly silly idea in the first place, and it's not much better now.

Also, ISP Totalise tried the model of hours online = shares back in the first dotcom wave, and I haven't heard of anybody who has made it rich out of this, even though they are, at least, still afloat having been bought out by Madasafish.

However, it's not really any worse than the 99 million pieces of spyware that are bundled with "free" applications that pay the writers in exchange for tracking your online activities and firing up popups, or the ones that get onto your computer by way of viruses and trojans. And at least it's clear about what you're getting into, and is your choice.

The moves they've made to stop abuse will no doubt help reduce their costs and make it less unsustainable, and certainly ad revenues have gone up since the last dot com crash, but I dread to think what the terms and conditions are in terms of what information they get about you.

Also get ready for a new generation of spam, as the main "earnings" now come from referrals not surfing. Of course, the owners claim they will clamp down hard on any spamming, but how effective that is remains to be seen.

But most of all, I wouldn't go about your lives expecting it to earn you a second income, for the shares to ever be worth anything or for the company to stay solvent for a particularly long time. We'll wait and see. Put it this way, I won't be queueing up to invest in the new company. µ

L'INQs
Agloco
Wikipedia entry on AllAdvantage