The audience sacrificed All advantage

In the startup environment, it is a habit to talk about successes to keep our hopes alive for the future, but it is a big mistake to forget the failures of the past and not benefit from the experiences of the past. For this purpose, the Ecomotive team has collected the experiences of a series of failed startups, so that reviewing their failed stories may be a basis for the success of new startups in Iran’s startup community. This collection will be published and made available to the audience in the form of the story of failure. We review the twelfth part of this series, which deals with the failure of the All Advantage startup.

All-Adventage was an internet advertising company that positioned itself as the first by giving a portion of the revenue from advertising to its users. Data driven website brought up The company became famous with its slogan “get paid to surf the web”. In fact, AllAdventage based its work on the online habits of its users.

The company was founded on March 31, 1999 by Jim Jorgensen, Johannes Paul, Carl Anderson and Oliver Brock in Hayward, California, with offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Sydney and Washington D.C. launched. During 2 years of operation, it received more than 200 million dollars from venture capitalists and the number of its members reached more than 10 million people.

The company’s initiative to reward users for adding new members has placed it among the top 20 websites in terms of traffic on NetRatings. However, this method was criticized because it led website members to send spam messages in order to receive more income and artificially increase their referral numbers, and the company was unable to stop them. With the increase of such problems, company managers faced a wave of anti-spam prosecutions; Including the first anti-spam bill that passed the US House of Representatives.

In order to solve this problem, for the first time in the world, Al-Adventage appointed an expert in the position of Chief Privacy Officer was hired to take responsibility for protecting users’ privacy and data and protecting this service from existing risks and threats. In addition, it also made changes in its incentive policies that led to a significant reduction in spam by 2000.

The company’s Viewbar software was one of the first examples of user tracking and advertising targeting technology; That is, it could display advertisements in a small window at the top or bottom of the desktop according to the content the user is viewing.

AllAdventage also faced the problem of scams by some hackers, which it combated by updating its software and preventing them from affecting its operations.

Ultimately, however, AlAdventage fell victim to the steep decline in advertising spending and Internet fever and the American recession in the mid-2000s. The year was cancelled. In this way, he tried new sources of income, including raising his rewards to the level of lottery. But after laying off about 150 employees, or 35 percent of its workforce, it finally gave up and closed its doors in February 2001.

AllAdventure was a great company for school kids who wanted to make $100 a month, but it failed to convince advertisers because they didn’t value this low-income age group. The company spent more than $150 million of its capital on these web surfers, while failing to attract customers.