Pay to surf (PTS)

Pay to surf (PTS) is a business model that became popular in the late 1990s until the dot-com crash.

Essentially, a company uses income from advertising placed on members' screens to pay them for time spent browsing the web.

A PTS company would provide a smaller program to be installed on a member's computer. Advertisers' banner ads were then displayed while the member was browsing the web. Since the company's Viewbar software tracked websites that the user visited, the PTS company was able to deliver targeted ads for their advertisers. Advertisers paid the company a small amount (typically US$0.50) for every hour of a member's surfing.

How does it work?

Members were usually limited on the amount of time per month for which they would be paid to surf (typically 20 hours).

However, PTS companies also paid their members for each new user referred to the company (typically US$0.05 - US$0.10 per recruit). Thus, it was profitable for a member to garner as many referrals as possible, encouraging some users to recruit members using spam, though officially forbidden by the user's agreement. Minors, many of whom flocked to these business models as an easy source of income, were required to obtain consent from a parent or legal guardian.