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This reminds me of a company my best friend’s brother worked for, alladvantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

They paid you to put a little ad banner at the bottom of your screen, and paid you like 5 cents an hour that you had the banner up and you were browsing the web.

It tried to watch your browsing to make sure you were actually there, but of course we wrote some script to programmatically visit random web sites. Then they added mouse tracking, so we added mouse movement to our scripts.

The most insidious part was that it was also an MLM… you would also get paid for usage by people you referred, too, and then even by people those people referred, with diminishing returns from each level. So like 1 cent an hour for my referrals and .5 cents an hour for their referral referrals.

We were broke high school kids, so we put so much time and effort into recruiting people and getting them set up with the auto scripts. By the end we were making in the low 3 figure a month. We knew people who were making even more.

Of course, it soon went out of business because of the dotcom bust as well as the ridiculous business model and rampant user fraud, but it was fun while it lasted.

  {
    headline: "We Value Your Privacy",
    body: "That's why we collect it so carefully. Accept the cookies.",
    style: "darkpattern",
  },

https://github.com/surprisetalk/AdBoost/blob/main/content.js...

I've been waiting for something like this for ages. Hope there's auto-playing video ads too

Can I buy a subscription to get rid of the ads?

What would happen (theoretically) if ublock would be changed to not only hide the ads, but click on each and every one of them. Would that disincentivize ad networks to run ads because the data would be poisoned?

Pretty sure I've removed scammy browser extensions that injected ads before, so this probably isn't "the only browser extension that adds ads to webpages".

But who do earns money from the clicks?

I would like to give this to people who argue that you shouldn't use ad blockers because ads help the website's owners financially and that's a way to support the owner. If this extension would send the money to the owner of the site where the ad is displayed, then I could refer them to this plugin so they can have ads everywhere and help all website owners ; )

Back in the day, a funny extension was the one that put a Jimmy Wales donation banner on every page https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/25/jimmy_wales_chr...

Those ads look better than the modern adware business. Simple. CSS graphics. Text.

It'd be cool if we could add a feature that places an ad inside the ad. Sort of like Ad-ception.

Thanks. I never knew how much I needed Weather Premium until now.

I was kind of hoping this would let me have ads that I get paid for.

Can it be used to insert content from an intranet server? It would be nice to have the ability to insert ads with company content, so people slacking at work get to involunarily learn about some opportunities or company policy.

Unfortunately the ads are fake

Just use Google Chrome.

... why OP, why

Finally, an honest product. Every other browser extension that injects ads into your pages pretends it isn't doing that.

need that rental gravity

Seems like every website ever is using this by default already

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I love it.

this is unironically useful bc if it works well, can use that algo to instead of serving ads, enrich ai responses by adding image and media previews appropriately at the right spots (layout modifications)

Ok, so I don’t have an NFL team. I played in high school and like the sport, but find it difficult to be loyal to a color and a logo. I also never watch ads at home on any platform.

So. Am I the only one who kind of likes watching the commercials more than the game when my family or friends make me watch football? They are entertaining when you only see them every now and then.

Now, banner ads are not in the same category. But above is a real use-case for enjoyment of ads.

Is there planned support for popups ?

I misread the title as “AdaBoost” and got excited for some old school ML discussions on HN. My disappointment is immeasurable.