They paid you to put a little ad banner at the bottom of your screen, and paid you like 5 cents an hour that you had the banner up and you were browsing the web.

It tried to watch your browsing to make sure you were actually there, but of course we wrote some script to programmatically visit random web sites. Then they added mouse tracking, so we added mouse movement to our scripts.

The most insidious part was that it was also an MLM… you would also get paid for usage by people you referred, too, and then even by people those people referred, with diminishing returns from each level. So like 1 cent an hour for my referrals and .5 cents an hour for their referral referrals.

We were broke high school kids, so we put so much time and effort into recruiting people and getting them set up with the auto scripts. By the end we were making in the low 3 figure a month. We knew people who were making even more.

Of course, it soon went out of business because of the dotcom bust as well as the ridiculous business model and rampant user fraud, but it was fun while it lasted.

  {
    headline: "We Value Your Privacy",
    body: "That's why we collect it so carefully. Accept the cookies.",
    style: "darkpattern",
  },

I would like to give this to people who argue that you shouldn't use ad blockers because ads help the website's owners financially and that's a way to support the owner. If this extension would send the money to the owner of the site where the ad is displayed, then I could refer them to this plugin so they can have ads everywhere and help all website owners ; )

So. Am I the only one who kind of likes watching the commercials more than the game when my family or friends make me watch football? They are entertaining when you only see them every now and then.

Now, banner ads are not in the same category. But above is a real use-case for enjoyment of ads.