Startups Pay Consumers for Browsing Data --- Online-privacy issues have made an opening for 'paid-to-surf' firms, their proponents say

"Growing privacy protections for internet users are breathing new life into an old idea: paying consumers for permission to track them as they surf the web. So-called paid-to-surf, paid-to-browse or browsing-rewards companies just need to get enough people to take the deal.

Startups in this space usually offer browser extensions that collect anonymized data on people's internet use much the same way that standard tracking tech does, with the goal of helping marketers target their ads to the right consumers. In return for installing those extensions and going about their browsing, consumers earn cash, cryptocurrency, discounts or gift cards.

The rewards are by no means large: Participants often save or earn less than $20 a month. But the startups' founders say their arrangement is fairer than the prevailing system, in which technology companies and advertisers routinely scrape consumer data without any compensation to the people they track.

"The trade-off at the moment looks incredibly weighted toward big tech, and incredibly unfair to us," says Swish Goswami, chief executive at Trufan Inc., which does business as Surf. "A little bit of compensation might help people at least feel like they're actually getting something in exchange for the data they're sharing, which is incredibly valuable to a lot of these companies."

The concept goes back as far as the late 1990s. Many early entrants crashed out of business after the dot-com bubble burst, though others have tried again in the years since.

Now there is an opening for a new generation of privacy-tech startups including paid-to-surf companies, says Lourdes Turrecha, a Silicon Valley lawyer and founder of tech-privacy startup community the Rise of Privacy Tech.

The new opportunities, she says, are the product of growing consumer sensitivity to online-privacy issues, privacy legislation in Europe and California, the adoption of an antitracking setting on Apple iOS devices and Google's plan to phase out the user-tracking tech referred to as third-party cookies.

"This is a critical moment where they're starting to get the ears of advertisers," Ms. Turrecha says, "because for advertisers, well, the old world is not working anymore."

OzoneAI Inc., which was co-founded in 2019, pays users to anonymously share their browsing and online purchasing data and answer survey questions to generate information that it sells to advertisers and market-research firms. The company also offers rewards when users indicate which types of ads and products they are and aren't interested in. These rewards come in the form of ads that include deals or discounts. Ozone has around 10,000 monthly active users, according to the company.

Surf, which was founded in 2018, similarly gains permission to track its customers around the internet, anonymizes the data and sells it. Its 200,000 users earn "Surf points" as they browse, and can trade those in for discounts, rewards and giveaways that are offered by the startup's "rewards partners."

These partners, such as Crocs and the Body Shop, participate as a way to gain new customers, but they don't gain access to Surf's wider data store, which firms have to pay a subscription fee to access, Mr. Goswami says.

Sliceline LLP, which owns Slice, has another pitch: It can help advertisers reach the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who use an ad blocker, according to Darina Oumanski, the company's co-founder and chief operating officer. Slice's target audience includes gamers and crypto enthusiasts, two often intersecting groups that are more likely to block ads online than the average user, Ms. Oumanski says.

"This is a certain audience that was already hard to reach," she says. Those who have an ad blocker installed must let ads from Slice's network through their digital nets to make money.

Around 20,000 people use Slice regularly, the company says, and the average user makes around $1 a month from browsing. They can withdraw their funds either as cryptocurrency or as cash. The money comes from marketers paying to advertise through the network.” [1]

1.  Startups Pay Consumers for Browsing Data --- Online-privacy issues have made an opening for 'paid-to-surf' firms, their proponents say
Deighton, Katie. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Oct 2022: B.6.