They are DEAD, but why ??? (alladvantage.com)

Member Name: mickm9

Product:	alladvantage.com
Date:	07/03/01 (188 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: No more easy money

This is not a review in the true sense of the word because this company no longer exists, however, I think it’s important that people understand why this company ended up folding in order to understand that it is not necessarily the PFS business model that is flawed (although it is no where near as successful as it first appeared) but in this case the company itself who contributed to their own downfall.

How did they do this ?? Well, they were in effect a victim of their own success, they were the forerunners of the popular adbars* that countless companies provide now, this popularity is half the reason for the demise of AllAdvantage but more of that later.

AllAdvantage soon found themselves deluged with surfers wanting to take advantage of this free money and eventually built their user base up into the seven million bracket. These users were all paid 30p an hour for the use of the adbar, on top of this anybody who referred another user also received 10p an hour for their usage as well. You can now see the attractiveness of this formulae. There were in fact countless people who referred thousands of users (they were referred to as builders) and these lucky people in return were collecting cheques in the 4 figure region …. every month !!

However the success of this concept quickly spawned several “copycats” and users suddenly found themselves with a choice of adbars, a lot of these chose to use several at a time (I did and still do) therefore increasing their revenue.

The problem is because these adbars were becoming more and more common advertisers were able to drop their rates accordingly, this is where AllAdvantage made their first mistake. Instead of taking heed of the fact that advertisers were becoming less willing to pay huge advertising, and hence adbar companies had less money to pass on to users they chose to continue paying users 30p an hour.

When they finally realised they were paying
out more than they were earning they decided to take action, this involved cutting the hours users could surf get paid for, not to mention cutting the rates they were paying. These rates became less and less attractive to the users who had in effect been spoilt in the past.

Unfortunately rather than come clean with their user base and explain all this AllAdvantage seemed to employ some pretty devious tactics to cut down their outlay. One of these I actually fell foul of myself so I know it is true. What they did was accuse large numbers of people of cheating and therefore freeze their accounts (note they didn’t cancel them) while they investigated. During this “investigation” the users couldn’t use the bar and therefore didn’t actually earn any money …. of course AllAdvantage would still have been accruing advertisers money !!

They would then after a period of time so “oops sorry, it seems we were wrong and your account is OK, please carry on surfing”

As if the above wasn’t bad enough they then started rail roading people into moving out of the paid surfing category and into a sweep stake game instead where instead of earning money you got entered into a sweep stake – BIG DEAL !!

Of course you had the option to stay in the paid by money bracket but they insisted that if you didn’t confirm this by a certain date you automatically got switched to the sweepstake game, as this wasn’t widely publicised a lot of people ended up being switched without realising it. This almost overnight wrecked lots of peoples “down-lines” (their referrals) and made it even harder for the average surfer to get enough in their account to get a cheque. God knows what it did to the guys who were earning thousands !!

This was compounded by the fact that any new joiners automatically went into the sweepstake, however what seems to have happened is the majority of peo
ple got so p****d off with the whole thing they stopped using it altogether. This ultimately meant that AllAdvantage weren’t such an attractive proposition to the advertisers so they started to struggle for revenue ….. hence their subsequent demise.
All in all it was a fairly sad and messy end to what had been a very popular company. I myself although not earning the hundreds that others did, had several cheques off them and I suppose for that I should be grateful.

So there you are, that’s what happened but as I said earlier don’t let it put you off the idea altogether because there are still some companies out there that pay you for simply surfing the net, its just a case of finding them. For that though there is thousands of sites that will point you in the right direction, (including my home page !!) one thing I would suggest though if you visit any of these sites have a quick look at what they say about AllAdvantage, if they are still proclaiming it as a great company you can be sure the sites not Worthing bothering with because it obviously hasn’t been updated for months and in the paid for surf world that is a a lifetime.


* An adbar is basically a strip, usually about an inch wide that sits on the bottom (or top) of your screen and displays banner ads as you surf the internet, the companies supplying these charge the advertisers fees and pass on some of this revenue to the surfer.

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