Comments on: Overscanning in order to fit in ads?

Question: Overscanning in order to fit in ads?

krisjohn — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:17:23 -0800

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?

By: misanthropicsarah

misanthropicsarah — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:36:01 -0800

i remember that. i used it, and got some money from it. alas, i don't remember what it was called. sorry!

By: falconred

falconred — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:41:50 -0800

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...

By: langeNU

langeNU — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:56:59 -0800

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!

By: teleskiving

teleskiving — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:40:07 -0800

Fascinating, I missed this at the time. The patent is online and has quite a lot of info.

By: Solomon

Solomon — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:06:40 -0800

Was it Agloco? When the programme runs, the desktop display gets "pushed up" (or down, depending).

By: langeNU

langeNU — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:30:58 -0800

Alladvantage became agloco at some point, although I never actually used it under that name.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:39:11 -0800

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