August 25, 2000

8:03 AM

The weezils at AllAdvantgae.com are up to no good. - First of all, who thought paying people to surf was a brilliant way to make money? AllAdvantage is now seeing the error or their ways and is switching all members over from the Pay to Surf plan to a new Sweepstakes plan regardless of whether their members want to switch or not. Apparently those who have bothered to read the email they sent out about the switch are getting pissed.
posted by Nyarlathotep (4 comments total)

Time to add them to the fuckedcompany.com list.

And if anyone deserves to be sued by the record companies and software manufacturers, it's them. I've lost count of the number of warez FTP servers which offer access to those who sign up to AllAdvantage and earn the owner referral points.
posted by holgate at 9:00 AM on August 25, 2000

Also check out what they do when you sign up, don't like it, and don't use it anymore:

Dear ____,

We've noticed that you haven't been surfing with your
Viewbar window for at least two months. AllAdvantage
exists so YOU can take advantage of the Internet, and
we'd like to make it as easy as possible.

[information about how to download the software again]

Please note that If you choose not to use your Viewbar
software -- so that your account is inactive (no
surfing at all) for three months -- we will charge you
USD 6.00 for those three months, and then USD 2.00 per
month thereafter as an account maintenance fee. Such
charges will continue until you become active again
(meaning you surf for at least one hour); your account
reaches zero; or your account is terminated according
to any of the ways specified in the Membership
Agreement. Of course, your account will not go below
zero.

We hope you'll want to start surfing again, and please
feel free to use any of the help resources above to
make it possible.

Sincerely,
AllAdvantage.com

What sort of "maintenence costs" could there be for an inactive account?
posted by kidsplateusa at 11:29 AM on August 25, 2000

Somehow I'm having a real hard time feeling any sympathy at all for "members" of alladvantage, no matter what happens.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 2:39 PM on August 25, 2000

True dat, Steven.

One of the guys in my office (he's sort of my assistant) actually uses it at work. It just sits there and runs ads all day. If you sit down at his computer, it randomly opens windows on you and such. The reason? He's got an alladvantage-specific program running that makes AA think he's "using" his computer just by moving the mouse, opening websites, etc. every five minutes or so. He also has an account running in his dorm room 24/7, so he rakes it in doubly. (All on somone else's bandwidth dime, of course ...) And not only those two accounts: each account also has dozens of referrals that earn him extra percentages on top of that.

The real nastiness about this, if it's not clear from skimming the above article, isn't that you get put in the sweepstakes automagically and have to choose yourself back into the AA paid-surfer program. The nastiness is that this will probably decimate people's referral trees ... trimming AA's monthly costs by 85%, if they're lucky.

I dunno. Looks like the fucked bleeding the fucked ... if you see it the way I do ...
posted by dhartung at 4:16 PM on August 25, 2000