Trouble in Surfdom
by Late Nite LeRoy
July 25, 2000
CNET reported troubles happening at AllAdvantage last week. They had to lay off 10% (60) of their staff. Pay outs to banner surfers (like us) between December and March were $32.7 million but incoming ad revenue was only $9.1 million. They are obviously using investor money to meet payroll. This is quite acceptable in a start up stage of a business, but with the number of viewers and advertisers that AllAdvantage has already obtained, there isn't supposed to be this wide of a spread. There is talk of belt tightening and going after cheaters, but my own experience shows me they expect my mouse behavior to fit precisely into their programmer's expectations or I don't get paid. Come now folks, how much "performance" can you logically expect from someone you only pay $.50 per hour? I'm sorry, but the AllAdvantage business formula is starting to fall apart.
Another banner, DeskTopDollars, uses a formula that won't allow over payment like AllAdvantage. They simply divide total revenue by number of viewers and pay out what they can. Last pay period, this came to only 7 cents per hour. They get to stay in business, but there's not much incentive to us to keep the banner flying at that rate. I think my electricity costs about that much.
I am still a fan of the BePaid formula. Advertisers go in KNOWING what the mark up is for the services they purchase, and KNOWING that every single ad they buy gets viewed by someone in the demographic cross section they specify. Viewers KNOW they are getting a percentage of what the advertisers pay. As long as every department in the chain keeps their budgets within this formula, we will ALL prosper, advertisers, viewers and BePaid corporation investors themselves. This is the best formula I've ever seen that actually gets money to BUY goods into the hands of those who NEED the goods.
The old stock broker term is "shake out." My choice is the BePaid system.
And beware of any emails asking you to go to the domain "paypi.com". ZDTV reports they had fraudulently set up a carbon copy look alike of PayPal's site and were stealing user names and passwords. Which brings up the point that anytime you do any financial transaction on the Internet, you should verify 2 things. 1, The URL for the business you are dealing with is EXACTLY what shows on your browser location ID box. and 2, the secure server lock on your browser should display in the locked position. As of the time I'm writing this, it appears the paypi site has been shut down.
--LateNiteLeroy
leroy@commutefaster.com
LateNite Leroy is webmaster for http://www.commutefaster.com
http://www.888webtoday.com