I don't know about you, but I got more than a little interested a couple of years ago when the "pay-to-surf", "pay-to-read-email" and other similar companies started appearing everywhere. I know that you've at least heard of these things, and I'll bet that most of you signed up for at least one of them. In fact, many people signed up for dozens and dozens.

You know what I'm talking about, don't you? The concept was simple ... companies pay money for banner advertising. Someone had a bright idea (it seems to have started with AllAdvantage but there may have been some company earlier) - why not split that money with the targets of the advertising?

So what they did is create a "bar" about an inch high and the width of the screen. In this bar the idea was to display a banner ad. Periodically the banner was changed. In addition, the bar was smart enough to observe the sites that you visited, thus enabling them to predict which kinds of ads would be of value to you. This allowed the pay-to-surf companies to charge more for advertising, since in theory the ads were more likely to be of interest to their audience.

At first glance this seemed like a great idea. I mean, you earn say fifty cents an hour to look at advertisements while you surf the internet. You won't make much, but it could at least pay for your connect time! And then a new wrinkle appeared...

That's referrals. You see, the pay-to-surf companies MUST get new web surfers using their service fast. They need to attract advertisers, and to do that they need huge audiences. So what they did is come up with a great pyramid scheme (I know they will object to that terminology, but that's that's the simple truth) - you get, say fifty cents an hour for your time, plus perhaps a dime an hour for anyone you sign up, and perhaps seven cents for anyone they sign up and so on.

So now you could theoretically make some real money. Sign up a few hundred (or thousand) friends and relatives, and watch those checks roll in.

So what was the problem? One big problem that started right away was cheating. It soon became obvious to anyone that you could sign up multiple accounts, set up bars on multiple computers, create programs to pretend to be surfing and do any number of other things to artificially inflate the numbers. This played havoc with the pay-to-surf companies, because it caused the "click-through" ratio to drop. This means the ad might be displayed a thousand times, but it's only valuable if it's actually clicked. Since robots were doing the viewing, the ads were not clicked and ... they became useless.

This resulted in full and open warfare between the cheaters and the pay-to-surf companies. Sometimes you would see your bar updated three or four times a week with new versions, modified to protect against some new trick or technique.

Another problem was spam. A year ago it was literally impossible to visit a newsgroup without viewing thousands and thousands of pay-to-surf advertisements. God did I get tired of these stupid little useless emails all saying the exact same thing - click here and join up for...

The spam got so bad that newsgroup robots were created to automatically delete any message with certain keywords common to this type of email.

Many people were also disturbed by the fact that these bars typically kept a record of surfing habits. Think about it for a minute - do you really want a database of every site that you've ever visited kept? Even if the pay-to-surf companies don't keep a record but just build a profile - it's still more than a little alarming. They could easily peg you as "a middle-aged male, smoker (visits smoking related sites), reads or at least buys books (visits Amazon.Com), watches movies (visits films sites), loves Star Trek (visits a lot of those sites) and other similar statistics. Do you really want people to know this about you?

The thing that delivered the final nail to the coffin of pay-to-surf programs was the complete failure of banner ads to deliver sales. You see, what happened during the year 2000 is people got tired of banner ads. Nobody likes them anymore and no on wants them. In fact, everyone that I know has software to remove them automatically from web pages.

So the click-through rate dropped from 2% to 5% down to under 1%. This meant that banner ads needed to cost less, because it took more of them to make a sale. Which in turn forced the pay-to-surf companies to reduce their pay-outs. And that made the desirability of the bar even less.

People hated the bars. They were ugly, they interfered with the screen, and they interrupted typing. On top of that, when many people began getting the checks they found they were receiving a few dollars, perhaps even as much as $10, and they began to think "why am I doing this?"

The pay-to-read-email programs were even worse, because in most programs you actually were required to click on a hyperlink to get paid a mere penny or even less in some cases. This means you might have to not only read a hundred emails to earn a lousy buck, but you actually had to visit a hundred web sites. Who wants to do that for such a small return?

Pay-to-surf never delivered on it's promise, because it was based upon lies and tricks. They are pyramid schemes, similar to the many of the equally dishonest and untruthful MLM programs. These schemes, like all others of their type, benefit those who get in quick and near the top of the pyramid, and those at the bottom wind up doing all of the work. Which is why virtually all of them fail eventually - unless they can keep finding new suckers ... uh, applicants to feed the higher levels.

You want some evidence of these rather harsh statements? Okay. A very well known MLM program just proudly announced they had just cracked the 650,000 member mark. Sounds good so far. They also very proudly said they had just paid out $450,000 to those people.

Um, I hate to tell ya'll this, but that averages less than a dollar a person.

And of course you know that most of the people didn't receive a dime. Why not? Because the people at the top of the pyramid are the one's who made a killing. The people who actually do the work didn't get very much at all.

What would I recommend? Delete all those bars from your system. Take the ads off your web sites. Remove yourself from the programs. If you have one that you particularly like and it's paying, then by all means stay. Then join up for honest money - programs like epinions.com (check out http://madscientist.epinions.com), ThemeStream and TheVines. These offer money (not a fortune, to be sure) in return for your work. And that's an honest dollar.

Copyright © 1999-2001 Richard Lowe Jr. & Claudia Arevalo-Lowe, Internet Tips And Secrets - All rights reserved.