huh. See, I thought the reason it failed last time,besides fraud[1], was a broader reason - it's the same reason paid surveys aren't worth very much. the idea is that the people you want to advertise to are precisely the people who are willing to trade money for their time; the opposite of the people you get when you pay folks to watch advertising.
[1], in 1998, I seem to remember that one of my co-workers had installed a thing on his work computer that would move the mouse and "browse" the internet when he wasn't there, getting paid for seeing ads.
Of the old ad networks only doubleclick survives and they only do so because of google massive anti-fraud measures.
Anybody that gets into ads these days will have to take abuse as their #1 priority to be able to compete so if this is to work at all you can bet that anti-fraud measures would make up a very large component of the package.
Tying the end-user and one of the primary beneficiaries to the same chair is a risky thing but not all forms of advertising are equally susceptible to this kind of risk. For instance, performance based advertising and to a lesser extent branding are not all that much at risk.
On another note fraud is present in all forms of online advertising at the moment (with the same qualifications listed above) and it is simply priced into the ad rates.
I had one of those ad-display things installed on my computer in that era. I used the manual controls on my CRT to push the ads off the top of the screen, so I could just see like a 2-pixel-wide edge that showed me the thing was still running.
[1], in 1998, I seem to remember that one of my co-workers had installed a thing on his work computer that would move the mouse and "browse" the internet when he wasn't there, getting paid for seeing ads.