HitBliss

» see hitbliss.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

You watched an ad, the software watched you watch it, and your balance went up by real money. Not points, not a loyalty tier. Cash in an account you could spend in a store stocked with Warner Bros. and Universal releases, or on a Pandora subscription at $3.99 a month. Roughly eight to ten minutes of commercials, about four ads, came out to one new movie.

The verification was the engineering. An attention assurance meter appeared while the ad played and you had to click it inside a short window, the same way online traffic school makes sure a human is still at the desk. Mute the sound or switch to another application and the ad stopped, along with the earning. Do this honestly for long enough and you accumulated trust points, which made the prompts less frequent. There was also an optional profile where you handed over location, age bracket, income and browsing history in exchange for a payout rate up to twice as fast.

Sharon Peyer and Andrew Prihodko founded the company in 2008 and spent five years on it before the public launch on 1 March 2013, funded privately through Alpond Capital. The framing in the coverage was Pandora for advertising, or a Hulu where the ad break was the price rather than an interruption to it. Fourteen months later it was gone.

I have no memory of this one, and I would not have been able to use it if I had. The store licensed American studio releases to American accounts, and the advertisers paying for that attention were buying an American demographic. Watching Turkish ads for Turkish credits was never a product anyone built, because the ad market was not big enough to fund one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the currency ~

The premise was that advertising already spends enormous money to reach you, and almost none of it reaches you as you. HitBliss proposed to cut out the estimating and pay the viewer directly for verified time, then let the viewer spend that money on the content the ads were normally attached to.

It is a coherent idea and it has a hole in it. The value of an ad impression depends on the viewer wanting something, and a person grinding through commercials to fund a movie rental wants the movie. The economics were fighting the mechanism from day one.

~ the suspension ~

On 6 May 2014 the company announced that the service would be suspended while post-beta preparations were completed. Users with a balance were told to redeem it for Amazon gift cards. Nothing about that sentence says closed, and everyone who read it understood what it meant anyway.

The site was not updated after that spring. There was no relaunch, no acquisition notice, and no shutdown post explaining what happened to the studio deals. hitbliss.com stopped answering entirely somewhere along the way.

~ the funny part ~

Every streaming service that had been selling itself as ad-free in 2014 now sells an ad-supported tier, and the price gap between the two tiers is exactly the thing HitBliss was trying to hand to the viewer in cash. Netflix and Disney kept that spread for themselves. The idea survived and the payout did not.

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