You can see paid2surf as a new way of advertisement. Companies have found out, that it's a way to gain a lot of (for them) precious information about their target groups that can be reached a lot easier in this way, which isn't the case when advertising on different websites and sponsoring. With this way of advertisement companies can gain demographics and interests of people that signup with the paid2surf provider, and sometimes they get the right to send this people e-mail if these people gave permission for it when signing up. On the average 60 % of the money made by paid2surf providers make, will be paid to their members. The information you're asked when singing up, is absolutely of no value to yourself and no private information (like name and adress) will be given to advertising companies. E-mail that is sent to you (this is done by the provider and not by the company itself in order to protect your privacy) are in your own advantage, because you receive money for each e-mail that is sent to you. Companies that only make money by sending advertising e-mail from different companies, are also called money4mail providers.
The way paid2surf works is very simple. To register, choose a member name and password and download a little surfbar program, that you can start up every time you make a connection with the internet. When connected, this banner will count the minutes of surfing and grade it with a certain amount of points. Each month after calculation of the point value (depending on hoe much money is made) these points will be represented in an amount of money, which will be paid to you when a certain amount is reaches (usually 25 euro or dollar).
In the surfbar you downloaded there will be banner-ads from different companies and/or sites. This surfbars will open above or beneath your internet explorer and aren't interfering with your surfing, depending on what you want. After 15 minutes you will soon notice that you aren't watching the ads anymore, but you're only checking your total points.
Some providers have a banner that only demand being on-line, while other banners demand active surfing to gain points. Here you can see an example of the spedia surfbanner:
Next to the surfbanners there also the possibility to make money by playing games, receiving or sending e-mail or make money by signing up for programs/sites. This sites van be game-sites, building you're own website, etc. You also can sign up for casino-sites and buy software, etc. that require money, but these offers are (mostly) only available for US-members