Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?

Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by erehweb on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:23PM (#33926044)

Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by Eszik on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:02PM (#33926427)

This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; the information is all there, stored in AllAdvantage's data banks, but only a tiny fraction of it is currently useful to advertisers.

Pretty funny to read this two decades later, where advertising giants built on top of users' data are some of the biggest companies in the world. Although they obviously offer a service that economically scales a little better than "pay each of your users"

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by isthisthingon99 on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:04PM (#33926441)

Being early is often the same as being wrong

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by romanhn on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:42PM (#33926749)

Yeah, that one was doomed from the start. Hacks to hide the popup and automate pretend-browsing came out almost immediately. As a teenager with a lot of free time on his hands, AllAdvantage was a great way to make a few bucks while doing what I already was all day.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by toast0 on Friday December 09, 2022 @08:57PM (#33928992)

I wouldn't consider it a failure, I earned a couple meals running that and resource editing aim to have Internet Explorer in the window title; I might have edited mirc as well, but I quit IRC during that time period. Didn't have to fake anything else.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? by cmer on Friday December 09, 2022 @11:11PM (#33929778)

Oh I made a (relative) killing with it too. I was running it 24/7 on multiple computers with bots to simulate activity. The fact that they didn’t realize that no human being can be awake 24/7 baffles me.

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