Overscanning in order to fit in ads?

November 30, 2007 4:17 AM

At the height of the "earn money viewing ads" craze there was a (PC-only) program that hacked the VGA driver, in Windows I think, to add a few extra lines in which to display ads. This would still give you, say, 640x480 for normal stuff with 20 or so lines added for an ad bar that went across the top or bottom of the screen. Does anyone have any pointers to information about it that survives on the Web?
posted by krisjohn to computers & internet (7 comments total)

i remember that. i used it, and got some money from it. alas, i don't remember what it was called. sorry!
posted by misanthropicsarah at 6:36 AM on November 30, 2007

Here's a 1998 Wired article about the technology. Amusingly, it was called "MySpace" back then. Something tells me they aren't in business any more...
posted by falconred at 6:41 AM on November 30, 2007

Was it alladvantage you are thinking of? (AllAdvantage.com is now a survey site, but I think that was the name). It was a bar of rotating adverts on the bottom of the screen circa 1998 or 1999.

I also remember downloading a program to keep my mouse moving constantly when I wasn't around, which helped wrack up the dollars.

Gone are the days of money for nothing on the internet, now you actually need content!
posted by langeNU at 6:56 AM on November 30, 2007

Fascinating, I missed this at the time. The patent is online and has quite a lot of info.
posted by teleskiving at 7:40 AM on November 30, 2007

Was it Agloco? When the programme runs, the desktop display gets "pushed up" (or down, depending).
posted by Solomon at 12:06 PM on November 30, 2007

Alladvantage became agloco at some point, although I never actually used it under that name.
posted by langeNU at 12:30 PM on November 30, 2007

Ah, a friend of mine made hundreds of dollars from AllAdvantage, before they did anything to check that the number of hours you spent online was less then 24 per day... :P
posted by delmoi at 8:39 PM on December 1, 2007