You clicked the tree somewhere and it would tell you either to try again, or you would win something. I think most people who won got $5 and a monkey plush toy. I’m not sure anyone ever won the jackpot. You could just click over and over again trying to remember where you had previously clicked, like a treasure hunt. Meanwhile they’re showing banner ads on the page.
It worked using the ismap attribute on the image which tells the browser to add the x,y coordinates of the user’s click to the link when fetching the result.
I still have two stuffed monkeys I “won” from that site, from when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize I was probably paying for them with my personal data.
Does anyone remember the TreeLoot.com MoneyTree? It existed from 1998-2004 and looked like this:
I’m all in favor of going back to the old internet, but… not this.
How did that work (or not) exactly? What was the goal
You clicked the tree somewhere and it would tell you either to try again, or you would win something. I think most people who won got $5 and a monkey plush toy. I’m not sure anyone ever won the jackpot. You could just click over and over again trying to remember where you had previously clicked, like a treasure hunt. Meanwhile they’re showing banner ads on the page.
It worked using the
ismap
attribute on the image which tells the browser to add the x,y coordinates of the user’s click to the link when fetching the result.I still have two stuffed monkeys I “won” from that site, from when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize I was probably paying for them with my personal data.
Oh wow. That takes me back. I remember doing it, but I also remember it being way too slow and annoying to do it for more than maybe 15 minutes.