One of the things that always fascinates me is when internet boomers talk about the old net. Despite all of us being online at the same time almost none of us used the same sites. We were all on different sectors of the internet, back when that phrase actually meant something. Today people will say they’re in different sectors but what they really mean is they’re just zeroing in on certain topics via the same sites. People who focus on different types of drama and where different internet etiquettes are followed call those sectors now. Not to sound too boomery but that’s not a sector. The internet of yore was sectioned off. The few social media sites that existed back then were competing with each other, which kept us split up. Previously I talked about how I made money by flaming people and reporting stores. See, I was in the money making/prize sector of the internet. Sites like Paypup, Swagbucks (who is somehow still alive), and tons more I can’t remember the names of anymore. Last time I also mentioned getting paid to help companies who make high fructose corn syrup. The internet used to be a wild place.
The start of the money making part of the internet begins with Google, oddly enough. Google used to pay you if people used your special Google search bar. This is why back when Elvemonk.tk was a thing I had a built in Google search bar at one point. Anytime someone used it I earned money. I earned about $30 from this search bar. This was how sites like Paypup and Swagbucks started. Paypup was a site that would pay you 2 cents a Google search up to 10 times a day. If you clicked their special Paypup links you earned bonus money. This is because Google paid you more if your users looked through the pages. However, if you clicked the bad Paypup link (I forget what they called it) you lost money. You needed to read the descriptions to know which was which. This was done because Google would punish you if people clicked every link in a search. Swagbucks took a different approach. Everytime you searched, up to a certain amount a day, you would earn points. Sometimes when searching you would get a chance to spin a wheel to earn bonus points. After earning so many points you could request a check be mailed to you, a gift card, or some prizes. Last time I used them they dropped the check part. There were tons of websites like this and if you knew how to play the game correctly you could earn a solid $20 a week. I was limited in my earnings due to not having a verified Paypal account due to my age. According to some adults I talked to, they were earning $300+ a week.
Another faction of the money making sector was PVP flash game sites. No, that’s not a joke. I wish I could remember the site I used to use, its logo was an orange M is all I remember. On this site you were given .01 for free and you could not cash out until you earned $10. The only way to earn more money was to play games against other players. , to show you how bad the games were, one of the most popular games was Rock, Paper, Scissors. There was one game almost no one played because people figured out you could tab+enter spam to cheat. So, you’d load up your game of RPS to the best of 3 rounds and whoever won got the losers money. You could only play against people who had the same amount as you did. So, if you had $10 your opponent also had $10. This meant if you won you now had $20. Losing would reset you to a penny so you could keep playing. Now, I bet you’re all thinking this was a scam, but no. I won multiple checks from this site. The way they made money was by having you watch and interact with ads while searching for an opponent and waiting for the flash game to load. I’m 100% sure they had a 1 minute timer on that loading screen before it would fully load to show you more ads. They also sent you “free promotional emails!” What this means is they sold your email address. If you lost too many times in a row you had to do a few Google searches before the website would give you another penny.
Before I go over the last part of the money making sector I want to spend a bit of time on the prize earning part. I can’t find anything on what was the first website to give away prizes but I do remember the first one I saw: Outwar. Outwar was a text based PVP game where you grew in power by getting people to click on your special link. This resulted in people spamming chat rooms with their links or tricking people into thinking they’d see boobies with a hidden Outwar link. Some people in my clan, yes I played, even made porn sites where our Outwar links would popup or would load via iframes. If you were in the top 3 slots of all players at the end of a season you could win prizes, or money. If you were the top of your class (gangster, monster, and pop star. No one could ever explain why they chose pop star) you could win small amounts of money too. I forget what ranks you needed to be for your class, but I remember it extending past top 3. To keep things fair every season ended with a wipe. However, what wound up happening was the people who won would recruit people much easier than others. This resulted in them having tons of recruits which kept them winning. Recruits were important because as your recruits grew in power you would gain a portion of that power. Why yes! The game followed a pyramid scheme model! Eventually Outwar created an eternal server that had no wipes or prizes. Eternal mode wound up taking over because people just wanted to get stronger and didn’t want the people in their clans to be their rivals for a cash prize. Outwar spawned countless clones that were all a success in their own right. Hell Outwar even spawned its own porn version called Pornstar Guru where NO ONE played the competitive mode because you would lose access to the free premium porn you earned. This genre of text based prize “mmos” is a very interesting piece of internet history that no one talks about anymore. Hell, while writing this I found out Outwar’s Wikipedia page had been deleted. Which is a shame because that controversy list was hilariously long. Outwar did lots of shady shit to stay in business. From installing adware on your PC via ad injections to getting you to sign up for “premium” referral services to earn premium currency. These sites often stole your CC info. I never understood why Outwar didn’t sell their premium currency outright, at least when I played. Somehow, Outwar is still in business. The original owners sold their network of games and many were taken offline. It’s since continued to exchange hands until landing with their current devs. I have no idea how long the current devs have owned the game, something a Wikipedia page would’ve surely helped with.
I hope you don’t mind me skipping to the end of the era for this next part. See, the prize earning/money making sector of the internet was later replaced with the money saving sector. This is where shit like Lockerz comes in. Lockerz and co followed the same model as Teets, but you needed to spend money. Well, Lockerz was originally a free prize site, like Teets, but later changed to a money saving service so they could stay in business. Despite their prices being higher than eBay, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and GameStop. I’m jumping too far ahead here. First, let’s talk about Teets, and sites like it. Teets was a very interesting website. You would guess things and if you won you’d earn some Teets. I can’t explain it further than that. You would guess crap like jelly beans in a digital jar to when a digital tower would fall. All sorts of weird stuff. You could also do surveys to earn Teets and bet them on special events. The special events replaced the guessing game of the day with… I can’t remember. It’s been so long. I remember one being a wheel you’d spin. Whatever. Then comes prize day. You would need to spend Teets to enter your name in the prize pull. If your name was called you needed to be on the site to claim your prize or it would raffle it again. If you didn’t want the prize you could put in 0 Teets and save up for the next one. It was actually a pretty fun little experiment. I used to email the admin semi-frequently and he would email me back. He would even email me unprompted asking how my life was going and all that jazz. They had a nice chatting system which allowed for the community to interact and grow with each other. There were lots of debates about Mexicans living in the US illegally. Sites like Teets popped up and all crashed at the same time. Those of us who watched this sector grow and mature knew how to abuse the game. This is why Lockerz switched from doing surveys to earn points and waiting for a prize rush day to win a prize. A prize rush day was when prizes were opened and it was first come first serve on prizes. Later Lockers switched how it operated and you now spent your points to apply a discount. One time a 15% discount from Lockerz bought WarioWare DIY to $45. Lockerz did not last. I’ve no idea how Lockerz or Teets made money. Neither lasted too long but Teets left a very favorable memory on me.
With that it’s time to bounce back into how I wound up helping corporate interest groups fuck over the US with high fructose corn syrup. Lockerz and Teets both used surveys so users could earn some points, but not a lot. This idea wasn’t unfounded and it’s the reason why at the top I put money making and prize earning together. If you’ve been on the internet long enough you’ve most likely seen an ad that said, “DO THIS SURVEY NOW AND WIN A ____!” Everyone thinks those are a scam, but for the most part they’re not. If you read the very fine print at the bottom of those you would know you just needed to do so many surveys and sign up for 1 platinum, 2 gold, or 3 silver products. Once you did so you would then win your prize and it would ship out in 3 months. The ad company determined what the platinum, gold, and silver products were based on how much each company paid to be in that ad campaign. For the longest while Netflix was a platinum product. This meant by signing up for Netflix you could have won a Wii, PS3, 360, a new TV, or whatever product they were giving away. By the time I had a debit card, which you should never use a debit card on these ads, the game had changed. The sign up requirements increased. Now you need a year’s sub to a platinum product and you have to wait 2 years to get your prize. So, I never got to fully take advantage of these. However, I did use them to earn points on survey sites.
A survey site is exactly how it sounds. You do surveys and earn points to win prizes/money. I found that the above mentioned spam ads had certain triggers. If you managed to make it to the platinum part and failed to sign up so many times it would send a survey completed flag to the survey site. I earned my points without needing a card. Some surveys would give you a small amount of points because they sent the flag the second you made it to the platinum products page. This meant you didn’t need to even attempt to sign up for the products. These websites were everywhere. There were gamer focused ones, which is what I used to load up Wii points, and ones for each niche group out there. With the gamer focused one I earned about $200 in Wii points. My family has always wondered how I kept getting Wii points to buy my virtual console games. There’s the magician’s secret. The gaming focused one wouldn’t mail out checks and if you earned enough points they would mail you games. However, when doing the math I found a $20 Wii point code was drastically cheaper than winning a $60 game. For the cost of a $60 game I earned about $80 in Wii points. Xbox and PSN codes also held a higher price than Wii points, for some weird reason.
Now the non-niche survey sites were where the money was at. These sites were weird because they encouraged 13 year olds to sign up. This is because 13 year olds are what everyone wants in focus test groups, and that’s still true. Almost all of our media is indirectly controlled by teens because the executives listen to them. The Simpsons have a wonderful bit about focus testing that is shockingly accurate. Focus testing should work, in theory. However, it ignores the psychological effect group thinking has on the individual. This is an actual part of psychology. The more people that are present the less likely one’s ideas will show. Meaning you’ll be yourself when you’re around 2-4 people but in a crowd of 20? You’re most likely to follow the crowd. If the crowd is watching a man try to get up off the floor you’re more likely going to not help him. If one person starts to help then others might join in and if 3 people start to help then most likely everyone will join in. Groupthink is an amazing psychological study. This is where focus testing falls apart. You might have liked what was shown via focus testing but if others start to say they don’t like it then you’ll most likely join in saying you don’t like it too. If you were neutral on it then the chances increase even more that you’ll join the rest of the group. Sorry about that tangent on psychology. I’m never going to get another chance to talk about focus groups. What made encouraging teenagers to sign up so weird is you couldn’t cash out if you were 13. You needed to be 18 or older to cash out unless you could get a Paypal verified account to accept your cashout.
Now, I’ve always been a man of science. I made two accounts. One where I was 18 and one where I was my real age. With my real age I saw way more surveys than my 18 year old account. However, the payouts were much smaller and I couldn’t get the money. With my 18 year old account not only did I earn more per survey but they would also mail me my check. I got 3 checks from that site. Also by being 18 I was able to be messaged exclusive survey deals and more. Which is how I wound up getting involved with the whole Amazon market manipulation shit. Unlike the video game survey site this one wasn’t just ads you’d see around the net. You would get invited to focus testing groups, see the above rant, and other marketing surveys. One marketing survey I remember was for a movie called Dirty Deeds. I know almost no one has heard of this movie. It’s not the Norm McDonald movie. During this marketing survey I had to watch 3 different trailers for the movie and give my feedback on it. I’ve always felt compelled to watch this movie because of this, but I never have. It looked fucking awful. However, it wasn’t the only movie I did marketing surveys for. I did these surveys for tons of movies, some of which never came out. I’ve always wondered why these movies never came out but then WB taught the world with Bat Girl it can sometimes be more profitable to write off a movie. I wonder how many movies I saw from these surveys that were written off and most people have no idea they ever existed. It’s weird to think that somewhere in my memory sponge is the remains of an actor’s career from a movie never launching.
However, some surveys never showed up on my 13 year old account. One of those surveys was an ad campaign for high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This one wasn’t like the others. It was a multi series campaign for HFCS. Every other survey was one and done. This one you could constantly get reinvited to take a part 2, 3, 4, and 5. I have no idea if it continued past 5 because that was my last one. Part 1 started like any marketing survey would. It showed you a few videos and you responded from a predetermined list of answers. For example How did this make you feel on a scale of 1 to 5. Nothing here really stood out.
Part 2 is where things started to stand out. Here we could write out responses. Part 2 was a mix of marketing survey and focus testing. One of the videos that stood out to me in this part was how a man was ostracized for getting his company to switch from HFCS muffins to all natural sugar muffins. His coworkers were upset that their muffins were more expensive. This part also had a free response. I wrote that this one didn’t motivate me to be pro or anti HFCS because it didn’t say how much the muffins went up by. Who would care if it was 10 cents? Boy, did part 3 teach me this.
Part 3 focused on the price differences. Every video was about how they were paying 5 cents, 10 cents, or even 25 cents more because of sugar. Part 3 was also the first time I’d ever been part of a semi-live focus testing group. Here when you answered you would see the responses from others. They had you read them to see if their responses changed your mind. Boy howdy were people fucking pissed at the cost of a muffin going up by 10 cents. One response said they hoped their co-worker would get fired over this 10 cents upcharge because he was stealing 10 cents that could’ve been used for their children. At the time I didn’t notice they were saying the coworker was personally stealing money. It wasn’t until reflecting on this one sleepless night did I realize what they meant. Which is a topic for an entirely different blog post. At the end of this survey they asked if our mind had changed and I said mine did. I now realize they took it the wrong way. I still felt the price increase was a bad argument. My mind had changed on humanity. Later HFCS groups would use these tactics, slightly changed, to change the perception of HFCS. At the end of this focus group we were asked if there’s anything that we felt was missing. Most of the people here answered no, but I answered about health concerns. At the time there was a rumor going around my school that the sugar substitute in Diet Coke would give you cancer and was addictive like crack. Guess what part 4 was about!
Part 4 was all about the health benefits of HFCS. Which fucked me up for over a decade. What’s funny about this is the misinformation here is now damaging HFCS’ use. This was about how HFCS has less sugar per serving than sugar giving you the illusion that HFCS is healthier than sugar. Nothing could be further from the truth. HFCS causes massive spikes in your blood sugar and raises the amount of insulin your pancreas makes. Which lowers your insulin resistance leading to you gaining weight much easier. When I said it helps you gain weight I don’t mean only when you’re consuming HFCS. Your body will produce more insulin whenever you eat or drink anything meaning you’ll gain more weight whenever you consume anything. There is a reason why sugar is natural and HFCS is made in a lab and is so much cheaper. This same lie they’ve sold everyone is now fucking them over as people switch to sugar alternatives that have even less sugar in them then HFCS. Even if we don’t truly know the negatives of these new sugar alternatives. Remember just because something has a low amount of sugar doesn’t mean it’s a low glycemic load, and the inverse is true too. After sitting through a bunch of bullshit scientific research I was asked if my mind had changed and I answered yes, in the way they wanted.
Part 5 was the most interesting one and it’s not until now have I seen it in play. This was an hour of my life where HFCS companies were trying to gaslight me into thinking products made with HFCS taste better than products made with sugar. They had some really weird points. One was how they can better fine tune a product to meld with HFCS so it gives a richer taste, unlike with sugar. Y’see I knew this one was complete bullshit because Mexican Coke was everywhere where I lived. So were other cane sodas. Everyone preferred the taste of the cane sodas and we paid more to enjoy them. At the end of this one I said my mind hadn’t changed and that sugar tasted better and yet that’s not the end. Sure, I have no idea if there were more parts to this survey but I’m seeing this argument pop up again in my real life. My dad works at an international food processing plant. One day he was bitching about Coke. Saying he hates that they keep trying to push the sugar version because it tastes so awful. He said, “Give me that HFCS, I don’t care.” Okay, a weird one off example considering my dad used to like Mexican Coke. A streamer I watched wound up saying the same idea, “I tried a sugar Coke the other day and it was dog shit. I don’t care about the goyslop. Give me the goyslop HFCS just tastes better.” Then a friend back home told me he also hates sugar Cokes now despite him strongly preferring them when I lived there. I found this outrageously weird. One by one everyone I know is turning their backs on cane sodas and then it hits me. They fine tuned the product for HFCS while sabotaging the sugar version. Of course I have no proof of this, but it would certainly explain a lot. In the end they didn’t even need to gaslight us. They have control of the formula.
Reflecting back on this was a very interesting wave of emotions. I remembered the group chats I was in to help exploit these services. I remember a secret AIM account only to be used for these services. I remember the people I would talk with and just no longer do. Then comes the weird sense of I can’t believe that shit worked. As a pre-teen to teen it was great making money online by doing stupid shit. I was able to buy so many Wiiware and virtual console games because of these sites. I was able to buy games like Manhunt 2 and Raving Rabbids because of those checks. It’s weird how outside of this blog post there’s no remnants of them on the internet, despite being a massive fucking sector. You had text based MMOs that had cartoons made about how annoying the user base was simply because you could win a PS2 by being the highest leveled character. Entire sites dedicated to gambling with free money or for marketing surveys. It was just a wildly different scene from the internet today. I am sure people from the other sectors have tales just as weird because the net was weird then. We weren’t forced to share the same 5 websites and pray to the algorithm gods that they don’t show us your annoying ass. Tons of these sites came and went. No Wikipedia page. No archive. Nada. Once the users go, so do the memories. Like WonPwn. No one knows what the hell WonPwn was. It’s just a memory I hold now. Huge swaths of the internet are missing. Like my first website, Monk Inc, just gone. People talk about being internet historians, not the YouTuber but people who actually try to claim that title, but when I asked them about Teets they said no such websites have ever existed. Everyone’s so focused on digital preservation of movies and games but they’re missing the preservation of the internet. Everyone believes once it’s online it’ll be there forever but that’s not true. SEO buries stuff. Servers die. Data is lost. Memories forgotten to time.