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HTMail press coverage.
Below you will find much of the press coverage that we have received to date, both good and bad. We try to include everything, but we are aware of press coverage in the United States (Tricity computing magazine and Pointcast), the United Kindom (Webmaster magazine and The Yokshire Post), Canada (The Vancouver Sun), India (Webvision magazine), Israel (Walla on-line magazine), Australia (The Daily Telegraph-Sydney, PC User-Australia and The Age magazine), Greece (Klik magazine) and Ireland (The Irish Independent) that we have not been able to obtain copies of. There is almost certainly more.
The Daily Telegraph (UK National Daily Newspaper) - Connected
12th August 1997
Richard Longhurst presents his personal pick of the week's new and exciting web sites
Turn all that junk mail into money mail
Whatever the socio-economic profile-building direct marketing people tell you, junk mail is a right pain. There's a limit to the number of unsecured loans you can take out, book clubs you can join and credit cards you can apply for. Worse still, the Net has breathed new life into junk mail, with unsolicited adverts for porn sites, get-rich-quick schemes and magical herbal remedies flooding mailboxes around the globe.
Joining the Mailing Preference Service will eventually reduce your Royal Mail junk mountain to a more manageable mole hill, but unfortunately for Net users there's no electronic equivalent. Services such as the Web-based DeleteMe have made a start by encouraging people who are fed up with "those obnoxious mailing lists" to submit their email addresses to a database that will be used to combat the junk mailers, but it's far from a sure-fire solution.
Bath-based HT Mail is taking quite a different approach to Internet junk mail (though it wouldn't call it that) by actually paying Net users to receive adverts in their in-box. This isn't a simple attempt to bribe you into downloading junk mail - when you sign up for the service on the company's Web site, you enter a personal profile that determines which messages are sent out to you. The theory is that you'll only receive news of products and services that you're interested in, ensuring that advertisers hit their target market and users don't have to resort to the kill file quite so often.
Subscribers can earn as much as 5p for each email received and 10p for each promoted Web site visited. Each time you soil yourself in this way, you're given a code which you have to send back to HT Mail to claim your cash - it's probably best to save up for a couple of months, unless you fancy banking cheques for 75p.
Practical Internet
August 1997 - Issue 5
PC Magazine
23rd July 1997
You'll Pay Me to Read Ads on the Web? OK!
By Don Willmott
Did you know you can make money surfing the Web? I've been hearing about a few different plans and schemes that let you make actual cash (or credit you can convert into merchandise) simply by agreeing to read Web-based advertisements as you surf around. Does it pay off? Well, I suppose that depends entirely on how much you value your own time (I value mine somewhere above the $5-an-hour fast-food burger flipper and somewhere below the $600-million-an-hour Evander Holyfield.)
The first surf-for-loot plan I heard of was CyberGold. Here's how it works. You sign up, answer about four screens' worth of questions about your personal demographics, get an account going, and then look over a menu of online ads. Interestingly, you can tell the service what kinds of ads you do and don't want to see. If you're not interested in cars, you don't have to look at car ads. If you're interested in travel ads, you'll get lots of them to explore. That saves you time and makes you an incredibly qualified consumer of those ads you actually do want to see.
Most ads are multipage, and they usually include a little quiz (or "game") at the end that proves you've looked at the entire ad. When you're done . . . ka-ching! You get a credit in your account for anywhere from 50 cents to a couple of dollars.
For advertisers, CyberGold is a relatively inexpensive way to reach consumers. They pay about $1.50 per guaranteed reader response, with most of that money going to the reader. That's far cheaper than direct mail, which costs up to $2 per piece, and given the low rate of response, can wind up costing $60 per response. As the president of CyberGold, Nat Goldhaber, told me, "People's attention has real value in an information society." Advertisers like Nissan, Intel, and Pacific Bell seem to agree.
So how do you spend your cybergold? On online services or merchandise. You can get a day pass to ESPN SportZone's premier services, buy prepaid cellular phone service, or take your money to the OnSale Internet auction house or to the Amazon.com bookstore.
Of course, any good idea will attract competitors, and CyberGold's newest rival is Intellipost Corp., which launched a site called BonusMail on June 30. BonusMail works a little differently than CyberGold. Sign up, and you'll get advertisements delivered to your e-mail inbox. As with CyberGold, you only get ads in categories that you've requested. Receive the mail, and you collect 25 Rew@rds points. Read the mail, and you get 50 more points. Take advantage of an offer, and you get between 500 and 1,000 additional points.
Then you cash them in. For 5,000 points, you can get goodies like $10 gift certificates to Barnes & Noble, Boston Market, Pizza Hut, Foot Locker, or the Gap. For 7,500 points, you can get 1,000 American Airlines or United Airlines frequent flyer miles, or two General Cinema movie tickets (plus popcorn).
If you gather 25,000 points, all the merchandise quintuples in value (your $10 gift certificates will be worth $50, for example). Not a bad deal, depending, again, on how valuable you think your time is.
You'll find a similar system and similar deals at British-based HTMail. The main difference at this site is that it pays out cash, rather than points toward merchandise. You'll get a check every three months.
You can also check out Surfpay, where every time you look at an ad you get an additional entry into the weekly cash prize drawing (first prize is a weak $25), but that kind of scheme doesn't seem nearly as attractive or useful.
Fortunately, all these services post flowery privacy statements, guaranteeing that your name and address will never go to advertisers unless you want them to. The advertisers will find out what kind of people are looking at their ads (that's how they decide to advertise again, of course), but that's all they'll find out.
What's nice about all this is that everybody seems to win. You win because you get to look at ads that may actually interest you, and you get free merchandise or cash for your trouble. The advertisers win because they know their ads are reaching highly motivated consumers who will be much more likely to take action on what they see. The services win because they get a cut of the action. Pretty cool.
Personal Computer World
August 1997
It can pay you to read junk email
A new UK company is offering to pay you to read junk email. The idea is that you join a membership list giving details about yourself.
You could then earn up to £45 by reading some five email flyers a day, according to HTMail, a new company founded by husband and wife, Dave and Karen Broadway.
The money comes from advertisers who save on the cost of paper flyers - and are only paying for ads that get read. Users prove they have viewed the mail by returning a code. "Unsolicited email is very intrusive, and often results in ... complaints and bad publicity. We overcame this objection by sharing the advertiser's savings," said Mr. Broadway.
The idea is not new. A web site at www.cybergold.com has for months claimed to be paying people for visits on a similar basis.
HTMail users must fill in a form, in which they can volunteer personal information.
Mr.Broadway said: "People are willingly joining our membership list and offering information...of great value to an advertiser in targeting products."
Network News
Wednesday 9th July 1997
WE ARE ANTI-JUNK!
Re:Network News, 18 June, and your story about users being paid to read junk email. Boy did your Reporter Sharon Marshall do a job on us!
I understand the angle that Sharon has taken, and the newsworthiness of such a story. [But] our whole ethos is to 'reduce' junk mail by giving advertisers a legitimate route to reach potential customers, and helping them to target the email to people who are genuinely likely to be interested in their products.
You will be aware of the amount of mass emailing and untargeted junk mail around. This will not go away unless there is a better alternative.
I explained to Sharon that the majority of people on our membership list have offered us what appear to be private email addresses, and that part of our terms and conditions is that the members should have legal rights to the email address offered. Even our Web site is designed to use the minimum bandwidth.
I understand the news angle in what you have published, but for the good of the Web community as a whole, will Network News let us publish the other side of the story?
Dave Broadway
Htmail
To give them due credit - they did!
The Observer Newspaper
Sunday 22nd June 1997
How about this for the minimum wage - £4.50 an hour to read electronic junk mail. This is a wheeze of HTMail, a UK marketing company which intends to get users to register with them and then provide their details to advertisers. In order to prove that you have read a piece of e-mail detritus you e-mail the advertiser with numerical codes, embedded in the messages, which are worth 5p each. Companies where employees are logged on to the Internet will view the venture with some alarm as the time-wasting potential is clearly enormous.
Internet_IT_Informer (www.news.com)
21st June 1997
UK net users offered cash to read junk email
Internet users in the UK are being offered £4.50 ($7.40) an hour to read junk email according to a report in trade publication Network News. However, some firms, including BT have threatened their staff with disciplinary action if they participate in the scheme.
The scheme was launched by UK firm HTMail and is intended as a way of overcoming the problem of junk email. Advertisers are encouraged to use the service as an alternative to the post, paying just 18p (30c) every time their advert is read.
Jon Bernstein, news editor of Network News is cautious about the scheme. "The hundreds of pieces of junkmail which are sent are a real pain to email users, so this is an interesting attempt to handle it," he said, "but it could end in disaster for companies. If staff get in on the scheme the network and the company will come grinding to a halt."
A more concerned reaction came from an NHS (the UK's National Health Service) source: "The suggestion that we should carry 'junk mail' across our networks when we do not often have enough bandwidth for trails of a much needed clinical purposes is to say the least a misuse of public money."
Insite - Press Association NewsCentre
Thursday, 19-Jun-97
Earn cash reading spam
By Giles Turnbull, New Media Correspondent, PA News
A British marketing company has come up with what it claims is the ultimate solution for the junk e-mail problem - pay people to read it.
The firm is prepared to pay ordinary people as much as £4.50 per hour to read adverts via e-mail, according to Network News magazine.
Businesses that have Internet connections in the office are worried that a scheme such as this would cause havoc with company computer systems, as people logged in to the system from their desks could earn extra cash, the magazine adds.
Spam mail is popular with some advertisers but hated by users, most of whom object to paying for an Internet connection only to be bombarded with adverts.
HTMail claims that with its system, everyone is happy. Users get ads about products that might interest them, advertisers reach their desired market, and each side benefits financially.
Advertisers will be attracted because the cost of sending an e-mail is a fraction of the cost of sending an item of junk mail through the post - and they can be sure that users have at least glanced at the material, even if they have not read it all.
Under the scheme, advertisers pay the company, HTMail, for details about people who have registered with the scheme. For every e-mail the users read, they are paid five pence. If they read the e-mail and visit the appropriate Web site too, they will get 10 pence. Viewing five e-mails and five Web sites per day would generate monthly income of £15.
Users have to prove they have read mails by collecting the code numbers stored in them and e-mailing them back to HTMail. Each code number will be worth at least five pence to the user.
But as there is no limit to the number of e-mails sent to people taking part, Network News claims that they could earn as much as £4.50 per hour.
Jon Bernstein, news editor at Network News, said: "This is an interesting way of trying to handle the problem of junk e-mail, but it could end in disaster for companies.
"If staff get in on the scheme the network and the company could come grinding to a halt."
Network News Magazine (front page headline!)
18th June 1997
UK corporates pledge to ban cash for junk email
Payment for reading email ads slammed
Sharon Marshall
IT Journalist
A scheme designed to offer cash in return for reading junk email could backfire following claims by network professionals that the scheme will clog up corporate nets.
Some companies said they will ban the service if hundreds of their employees try to make a quick buck.
UK firm HTMail says it will pay email users up to £4.50 an hour to read the ads. That's 90p an hour more than McDonalds' hourly rate.
Willing junk email recipients are sent a series of online ads which they must read to locate a code as proof of the visit.
No purchase is needed to earn the cash - just a list of the codes. Advertisers pay HTMail 18p for each mailer which is read.
The scheme is being totuted as a solution to the scourge of junk email, but has angered corporates.
BT says it will tell staff it is not good to talk to HTMail. "If we found staff using this servie there would be appropriate disciplinary action taken," said a spokesman.
An NHS source added: "The suggestion that we should carry junk email on our networks when we often do not have enough bandwidth for trials for clinical purposes is a misuse of public money."
Unsupervised students may be attracted to the scheme, but Ken Mackay, IT support manager for Worcester College, said it would not be encouraged.
New Scientist Magazine
14th June 1997
IF YOU need a clever comeback to those folks accusing you of being a wastrel and a mouse potato, tell them it is not a way of life but a profession. Not a very well paid one admittedly, but you could earn £20 a month from the comfort of your own home.
No, really. This may sound like dozens of other e-mails you get each month once you have some weeks of surfing under your mouse. But thanks to HTMail (http://www.htmail.com/) you may soon be inviting direct marketing messages into your mailbox rather than cursing them. HTMail is offering cash for every e-mail from its clients that you read, and every one it its clients' Web sites you visit.
Not a lot of cash - 5p for each e-mail you open and 10p for each Web site visited. Each qualifying site or e-mail comes with a code number - collect the numbers and send them back to HTMail and the company will pay you for each one you return. To get around £20 a month you would "only" have to look at five direct marketing e-mails and five Web sites a day.
Though HTMail has to pay you, it believes it can still make a profit because advertisers are willing to pay good money to get their message across. After all, as HTMail point out to advertisers thinking of using its service, 5p is a fraction of the price of a direct postal mailing, and advertisers will know that their potential customers have at least glanced at their material.
Intern Online Magazine
12th June 1997
Bargeld für Reklame-Mails
Im World Wide kennt man Angebote dieser Art schon zur Genüge: Onliner erhalten
Gratifikationen, wenn sie sich der Online-Werbung aussetzen.
Der in Deutschland prominenteste Anbieter dieser Art ist Germany.Net. Dieses
Unternehmen bietet nach eigenen Angaben inzwischen über 160.000 Teilnehmern
kostenlosen Internet-Zugang.
Als Gegenleistung müssen die Germany.Net-Teilnehmer beim Wechsel von Site zu Site
eine Art Unterbrecherwerbung hinnehmen.
Ein britisches Ehepaar hat nun das Konzept der „Belohnung für Werbekonsum"
übernommen und bietet einen entsprechenden Mail-Service an: HTMail.
Teilnehmer an dem Verfahren erhalten Mails von Werbekunden des
Familienunternehmens. Jede dieser Mails enthält einen Zahlencode, der an HTMail
zurückgeschickt werden muß.
Für jede dieser Codenummern werden dem Teilnehmer 8 Cent bzw. 5 Pence
gutgeschrieben. Der so "erworbene" Gesamtbetrag wird vierteljährlich als Scheck
verschickt.
Das System geht aber noch weiter: HTMail-Werbekunden sollen auch auf ihren
WWW-Seiten Informationen zusammenstellen.
Diese WWW-Seiten beinhalten ebenfalls einen Code. Wird dieser an HTMail
zurückgeschickt so erhält der Teilnehmer jeweils 16 Cent bzw. 10 Pence.
Auch Kleinbeträge wachsen bekanntlich zu ansehnlichen Summen. Bei 5 Mails und 5
WWW-Seiten pro Werktag werden 24 US-Dollar monatlich gutgeschrieben.
Für den Werbekunden kann diese Art der Reklame durchaus vorteilhaft sein. Zunächst
ist eine zielgruppengenaue Ansprache möglich, da jeder Teilnehmer eine Vielzahl von
Angaben machen muß, wenn er oder sie möglichst viele Werbebriefe erhalten will.
Das Abrechnungssystem besteht aus zwei Komponenten: Zunächst wird eine
Initial-Gebühr erhoben, die sich an der Anzahl der anzuschreibenden Adressen und an
der Genauigkeit der Zielgruppendefinition orientiert.
Werden weniger als 10.000 Mail-Adressen angeschrieben, so zahlt der Werbekunde für
jedes Zielgruppen Kriterium 10 Cent bzw. 6 Pence. Sind es mehr als 10.000, so
reduzieren sich die Kosten auf nur noch 1,7 Cent bzw. 1 Pence.
Wurde eine Stichprobe mit weniger als 10.000 Teilnehmern durch die Merkmale „Alter",
"Geschlecht" und "Nationalität beschrieben (z. B.: deutsche Männer unter 30), berechnet
HTMail pro Code 30 Cent bzw. 18 Pence.
Die zweite Komponente ist abhängig vom Werbeerfolg: Für jeden zurückgeschickten
Code aus einer Mail werden nochmal 10 Cent (6 Pence) verlangt.
Für Codes, die auf den Werbeseiten der Kunden zu finden waren werden sogar 20 Cent
(12 Pence) verlangt.
Ob der Werbeerfolg im Falle der Zurücksendung des Codes tatsächlich unterstellt
werden kann, bleibt fraglich, denn es genügt ein oberflächliches Überfliegen des
jeweiligen Textes.
Andererseits halten sich die Kosten bei diesem Verfahren in Grenzen: Die Betreiber
geben folgendes Beispiel: Als fiktive Zielgruppe werden US-Amerikaner unter 24
angegeben (2 Kriterien), was zu einem Sample von 12.000 Teilnehmern führt.
Die Grundgebühr beträgt also 408 Dollar. Sollten in diesem fiktiven Beispiel alle
Teilnehmer den Mail- und auch den WWW-Code zurückschicken, so müßte der Kunde
nochmals 3.600 Dollar zahlen.
Insgesamt würde die Rechnung also 4.008 Dollar betragen, was einem Tausenderpreis
von 334 Dollar entspricht.
Zum Vergleich: AltaVista verlangt für die Schaltung eines Banners auf den Seiten der
Suchmaschine einen Tausenderpreis (Basis: "impressions") von 30 Dollar.
Geht man von einer durchaus realistischen Click-Thru-Rate von etwa 2,5 Prozent aus, so
erhöht sich der Tausenderpreis auf 1.200 Dollar.
Dieser Werkekontakt kann allerdings qualitativ nicht mit dem HTMail-Kontakt
verglichen werden. Im Falle der Bannerwerbung wird der Kunde durch sein Interesse an
der Werbeinformation auf die Seiten des Anbieters geführt.
Beim HTMail-Verfahren ist es dagegen die Aussicht auf einen finanziellen Vorteil.
Trotzdem ist dieses Verfahren zu begrüßen: Es stellt eine Alternative zum Spamming dar,
dem unerwünschten Versand von Werbemails.
YAHOO Daily Double Scoop
Monday 9th June 1997
A New Chance to Get Paid for Using the Net
INTERNET IDEAS TEND TO TAKE A FEW MONTHS TO MAKE IT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC . A year or so after a bunch of American companies, such as Juno, began to offer a free, ad-supported e-mail service, a British company, HTMail Ltd., has put up a Web site touting another spin on the same concept.
People willing to receive e-mail solicitations sign up online, and are paid "reasonable" amounts, according to principal David Broadway. "Reasonable" nets out to a 45 pounds ($72) payment every three months, for people willing to receive five e-mails each weekday. (Users return a code number to show that they read the e-mail messages.) A Berkeley, California-based company, CyberGold Inc., has a variant of this formula, paying Web users to look at ads online.
Broadway said he didn't get the idea from what the U.S. companies are doing. "The original idea came from looking at direct mail (my background is in printing) and how it could be applied to the Internet," he recalled. "The aim is to enable advertisers to be proactive (as they are in direct mail), while giving the
recipient the ability to control what they are willing to receive."
He argued that far from being an irritant, such solutions actually reduce the hazards of spam: "E-mail is such a low-cost way of targeting a market that spam e-mail will become a bigger and bigger problem, unless there is a commercially available alternative," he said.
UK Channel 4 TV Teletext p.652
Saturday 7th June 1997
Pay as you read
Fancy earning some money very time you read an e-mail? Well a new company is offering net users 5p for every e-mail they get.
Bath based HTMail says it is lining up a number of advertisers and will target mail to specific users on it's mailing list.
The company promises its service will not be used as junk e-mail.
www.teletext.co.uk/co-uk.htm
Tuesday 3rd June 1997
Pay as you read - 3/6/97
Fancy earning some money every time you read an e-mail? Well a new company is offering Net users 5p for every e-mail they get.
Bath-based HTMail says that it is lining up a number of advertisers and will target their mail to specific users on its mailing list.
"List members can tell us as little as they want, on the understanding that the more information they provide, the more chance they have of meeting an advertiser's criteria, and therefore earning more money," says HTMail co-founder Karen Broadway.
According to Broadway, advertisers will only be charged if a list member reads the e-mail.
Broadway adds that HTMail is not like sending out junk e-mail: "We offer an alternative to mass unsolicited e-mail, and since our e-mail will be much more targeted, we waste less bandwidth."
zdnet.com - News Page
3rd June 1997
UK firm offers cash for reading e-mail
Tue, 03 Jun 1997 14:08:43 GMT - Martin Veitch
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A UK company is offering PC users money to read e-mail.
HTMail is a membership list under the terms of which users enter personal information so that advertisers can tailor mailings to a specific audience.
"The cost of sending an e-mail is a very small fraction of the cost of sending direct mail," said Dave Broadway, founder of the company. "However, unsolicited e-mail is very intrusive, and often results in the sender receiving complaints and bad publicity. We overcome this objection by sharing the advertisers' savings with the consumer. As a result people are willingly joining our membership list, and offering information about themselves of great value to an advertiser in targeting his products to the right audience".
The firm claims that users willing to receive five e-mails each weekday can earn up to £45 every three months. Members claim their bounty by collecting code numbers from e-mails and Web sites to which they are directed.
Our Current Press Release (Full Text)
Bath, England. 1st June 1997
*Internet users to get paid to read e-mail*
A British company has today launched a new membership list that offers to pay members to read advertiser's e-mails. Husband and wife team Dave and Karen Broadway have launched HTMail Ltd to take advantage of the huge difference in cost between postal advertising and e-mail in offering a brand new method of direct marketing.
Dave Broadway explains "The cost of sending an e-mail is a very small fraction of the cost of sending direct mail. However, unsolicited e-mail is as intrusive as direct telephone marketing, and often results in the sender receiving very many complaints, and bad publicity. We overcome this objection by sharing the advertisers savings with the consumer. As a result people are willingly joining our membership list, and offering information about themselves of great value to an advertiser in targeting his products to the right audience".
Prospective members join the membership list on-line by connecting to the HTMail web site at http://www.htmail.com. They are asked to fill out a form, and may give as much, or as little detail about themselves as they like. "HTMail puts the power in the hands of the consumer." says Karen, "List members can tell us as little as they want, on the understanding that the more information they provide, the more chance they have of meeting an advertisers criteria, and therefore earning more money. Our members have the option of barring any company that they don't like from advertising to them, and they can resign from the list whenever they wish, since we only rent the list to advertisers".
Payment levels are reasonable. A list member willing to receive 5 e-mails each weekday would be paid £45 ($72) every three months. List members collect code numbers from the e-mails they receive, and from web sites where the e-mails direct them. The member is then credited for all the code numbers returned to HTMail.
The advertiser only pays full price for those people that read his e-mail, or view his web site. This may be the first time that an advertiser has been able to write to a voluntary audience, who want to hear from him, only having to pay for those people that read his message.
Another advantage of this method of marketing is speed. Electronic marketing offers practically instant response. It is possible to measure the response to an offer within hours, and to immediately optimise the e-mail and the web site.
Karen concludes "We believe that HTMail offers advantages to everyone concerned. Our members get paid to read e-mail, and will be offered products of interest to them, since the advertiser can target the right audience. The advertisers gain a willing list of people from all over the world who have volunteered information about themselves. They only pay for those people that read their offering, and even then at less than half the cost of the cheapest direct mail. We also offer an alternative to mass unsolicited e-mail, and since our e-mail will be much more targeted, we waste less bandwidth. Finally, huge volumes of paper and tremendous expenditure of energy are not required, so the environment benefits as well".
Potential members or advertisers can find out more on the HTMail web site at http://www.htmail.com or e-mail info@htmail.com.
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