Surfing your way to riches?

By Senwung Luk and Carol Huang

Most Yale students have probably received a fair amount of unsolicited advertising and forwarded e-mails from friends and barely-remembered acquaintances urging them to sign up for one Internet money making scheme after another. Some would jump at the opportunity to make another couple of bucks a week—to upgrade from a small to a large latte at Booktrader on a regular basis, but some would balk at having to sign up at "another one of them websites." What is there to do when you're faced with such a choice? Here's a quick guide to help you make an informed decision.

COURTESY ePIPO.com

The basic idea: these schemes pay web users to surf the Internet while a banner ad flashes in its little rectangular box on their screen. These "middle-men" receive money from large companies who buy space or time to have their ad displayed in the box, and disperse a percentage of that revenue to "reward" users. People hesitate when confronted with e-sales pitches. There's a certain pyramid scheme quality to these programs, with the large companies making big bucks at the top and filtering down paltry checks of 50¢ per hour to bottom-level web users. Although the structure does resemble a pyramid, they are unlike pyramid schemes in that they actually render a service. They are harmless in that registration will probably be the hardest part, and, depending on how financially ambitious you are, you can really let the banner rip while you surf, and find friends to join you in the banner ad bandwagon. Monthly $30 checks in the mail could be worth five minutes of clicking on "Interests: Movies," scrolling down to "Income: $0-10,000," and typing joe.smith@yale.edu. Although they vary in "reward" rates, the programs have the same basic structure. Here are the most popular ones:

A crash course in compiling computer currency

People hesitate when confronted with these e-sales pitches, that essentially advertise ads. Many accuse these programs of being pyramid schemes, with the large companies making big bucks at the top and filtering down paltry checks accumulated from $.50/hour to bottom-level web users like us. Although the structure does resemble a pyramid, they are unlike pyramid schemes in that they actually render a service. They are harmless in that sense—no tasking bruntwork but to register, and, depending on how financially ambitious you are, turning on the banner while you surf, and finding friends to join you in the banner ad bandwagon. Monthly $30 checks in the mail could be worth five minutes of clicking on "Interests: Movies," scrolling down to "Income: $0-10,000," and typing joe.smith@yale.edu. Although they vary in "reward" rates, the programs have the same basic structure. Here are the most popular ones:

AllAdvantage.com

ePIPO.com

GoToWorld.com

UtopiAd.com

Ads ads everywhere, and many an e-product to link

These services have grown quickly: AllAdvantage.com claims at least eight million users, 1.6 million of whom have referred someone else to the service. The proliferation of these services is all the more striking when one considers the age of the industry: AllAdvantage.com, for example, one of the pioneers in this business, was only founded in February 1999. In that short time, these services have completely changed the way we think about the Internet.

Not so long ago, Internet service was something the user had to pay for, at prices set by the whims of the Internet service provider (ISP) market. However, as bandwidth and the speed of the Web became less of an issue, startups began mining untapped resources, such as the less desirable portions of net users' screens, and turning them into mini electronic billboards. For the net user, time spent surfing on the Internet, instead of incurring service charges from ISPs, would instead be time well spent watching advertisements on an electronic banner, making money all the while. Other startups soon caught on to the idea, but modified it—instead of using banners, they would send emails with advertisements to users, in a sort of electronic junk mail scheme.

Advertisers, at first, seemed to jump at such services. Never before have they been able to target an advertising audience so precisely—users who sign up for these services also sign over demographic information about themselves, such as age group and address, as well as a list of areas for which they express interest in receiving advertising.

What if users just tune out the ads? As David Ort, a second-year undergraduate at the University of Toronto puts it, "AllAdvantage.com is the easiest way to make money for doing nothing." As these services have grown, however, they seem to have hit a glut in finding advertisers. All of the programs listed above have had to scale back the maximum allowable amount of advertisement that you can see.

Because users are only paid for "active surfing time," it is not surprising that several programs have already been developed for the sole purpose of moving your mouse pointer while you are not at your computer so that the service is convinced that you are still browsing the Internet.

Companies can even benefit from users who never look at the advertisements. Unlike anything the advertising industry has seen before, this technology enables the service to track exactly where the user is going on the Internet. Not only does this give them the ability to compile statistics on the surfing preferences of its users, but it can also target advertisements according to the website the user is visiting. In the information packet AllAdvantage.com offers to its prospective advertisers, for instance, there is an example of a user visiting amazon.com while the ad bar shows a plug for Barnes and Nobles. This new technology gives the advertiser more power than ever before.

But is it right? Is it really right?

It may be all fine and good for students to be getting $30 checks every month, but this kind of Internet activity is actually somewhat problematic when one considers the Yale ITS Appropriate Use Policy. This policy, to which all Yale students agreed in order to gain access to the Internet on campus, states "commercial use of IT Systems for non-Yale purposes is generally prohibited." This part of the policy exists in order to protect Yale's status as a non-profit entity.

Does participation in these ad programs constitute commercial use? To find out more, we contacted H. Morrow Long, the University's Information Security Officer. Mr Long wrote via email that most use of these ad programs would fall under "casual and personal" use, along with activities like, "clipping coupons or winning contests at search engines." The line could very easily be crossed, however. "If the behaviour were not just personal, but the user were running a larger commercial business in their dorm room -- by promoting the service to other users in an attempt to financially benefit from the other users enrolling under sponsorship (e.g. an "associate" program)—they would be in violation of Yale regulations against running a commercial enterprise out of their residential college dorm room."

Similarly, according to Mr Long, running multiple computers from one dorm room just to make money on these services would also violate the Appropriate Use Policy. Finally, should any such personal use take up network bandwidth to an extent that creates problems for the Yale network, ITS would also consider it problematic. So far, bandwidth has not been enough of a problem for ITS to even keep track of students' use of these ad programs.

So in the end, there is really little reason not to rent out some of the space on your monitor, except for the nuisance that it might become, or if you have qualms about selling your personal information. For Yalies, those extra bucks can mean an extra coffee at Book Trader, or even the chance to adopt a child in a poor country overseas.