4 ms·

Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/07/10/283752/ https://money.cn

Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/07/10/283752/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...

Eszik 4y ago
This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; the information is all there, stored in AllAdvantage's data banks, but only a tiny fraction of it is currently useful to advertisers. Pretty funny to read this two decades later, where advertising giants built on top of users' data are some of the biggest companies in the world. Although they obviously offer a service that economically scales a little better than "pay each of your users"
- isthisthingon99 4y ago
  Being early is often the same as being wrong
romanhn 4y ago
Yeah, that one was doomed from the start. Hacks to hide the popup and automate pretend-browsing came out almost immediately. As a teenager with a lot of free time on his hands, AllAdvantage was a great way to make a few bucks while doing what I already was all day.
- toast0 4y ago
  I wouldn't consider it a failure, I earned a couple meals running that and resource editing aim to have Internet Explorer in the window title; I might have edited mirc as well, but I quit IRC during that time period. Didn't have to fake anything else.
- cmer 4y ago
  Oh I made a (relative) killing with it too. I was running it 24/7 on multiple computers with bots to simulate activity. The fact that they didn’t realize that no human being can be awake 24/7 baffles me.

Eszik 4y ago

This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; the information is all there, stored in AllAdvantage's data banks, but only a tiny fraction of it is currently useful to advertisers. Pretty funny to read this two decades later, where advertising giants built on top of users' data are some of the biggest companies in the world. Although they obviously offer a service that economically scales a little better than "pay each of your users"

isthisthingon99 4y ago
Being early is often the same as being wrong

romanhn 4y ago

Yeah, that one was doomed from the start. Hacks to hide the popup and automate pretend-browsing came out almost immediately. As a teenager with a lot of free time on his hands, AllAdvantage was a great way to make a few bucks while doing what I already was all day.

toast0 4y ago
I wouldn't consider it a failure, I earned a couple meals running that and resource editing aim to have Internet Explorer in the window title; I might have edited mirc as well, but I quit IRC during that time period. Didn't have to fake anything else.
cmer 4y ago
Oh I made a (relative) killing with it too. I was running it 24/7 on multiple computers with bots to simulate activity. The fact that they didn’t realize that no human being can be awake 24/7 baffles me.