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"
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.
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.
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.
”The service raised $1.75 billion from investors. It launched in April 2020, but shut down in December 2020 after falling short of its subscriber projections.”
I don't see MySpace as a failure. It had its time and place and remained relevant for surprisingly long time after Facebook took their crown with MySpace Music.
In a sense, Uber. Billions of dollars invested with the promise of winning the race to self-driving. It wasn't the only massive mistake they made, but after they killed that homeless lady in Arizona, they killed their self-driving units as well.
Star Citizen is a video game that had a crowd-funding campaign in 2012, ten years ago, and has since raised over $500 million from its player base and another ~$150 million from private groups.
It's still in alpha.
Most of the player base have resigned to calling the game vaporware.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadPretty 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"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&ab_channel=AvE
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi
Govworks.com by that sleezy dude Kaleil Isaza Tuzman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjk-WmtNs3g&t=19s
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/biggest-startup-failures...
FTX?
It's still in alpha.
Most of the player base have resigned to calling the game vaporware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen#Delays_and_extend...