This reminds me of a company my best friend’s brother worked for, alladvantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

They paid you to put a little ad banner at the bottom of your screen, and paid you like 5 cents an hour that you had the banner up and you were browsing the web.

It tried to watch your browsing to make sure you were actually there, but of course we wrote some script to programmatically visit random web sites. Then they added mouse tracking, so we added mouse movement to our scripts.

The most insidious part was that it was also an MLM… you would also get paid for usage by people you referred, too, and then even by people those people referred, with diminishing returns from each level. So like 1 cent an hour for my referrals and .5 cents an hour for their referral referrals.

We were broke high school kids, so we put so much time and effort into recruiting people and getting them set up with the auto scripts. By the end we were making in the low 3 figure a month. We knew people who were making even more.

Of course, it soon went out of business because of the dotcom bust as well as the ridiculous business model and rampant user fraud, but it was fun while it lasted.