3 ms·
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers wou
by ipaddr 2y ago
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
- kragen 2y ago2004 was yesterday i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
- amatecha 2y agosame year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.
- kragen 2y agoone way in which firefox is worse now is that ftp support got broken a few years ago
- Phiwise_ 2y ago1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.
- xp84 2y agoI remember the weird ‘paid to surf’ things. Hilarious what wildly silly business ideas pop up when money is cheap and people are exuberant.
- rightbyte 2y agoWas that some kind of ad revenue sharing?
- 10729287 2y agoYes, check All Advantage. It was a browser addon showing you add while you were browsing. I remember receiving a check from them (adressed to my mother obviously) when I was a teen.
- WeylandYutani 2y agoWell people made fun of ordering Domino's on the internet (hack the planet!). Now I have their app on my phone.
- pjc50 2y agoGoogle was, ironically, a reaction to how heavily ad-laden Altavista was. Russ Alberry's famous rant about spam ruining USENET was 1998: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html and should be required reading for anyone trying to build a decentralized communication system. > pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it That was indeed where the good stuff was (and some of the bad stuff; BBS culture could be flamey and cliquey as well as welcoming). It was so good that an entire generation of people keep trying to build it over and over again, such as bluesky, mastodon, and the deceased cohost.