For a brief period during the late 90's, there were websites known as "Pay to surf" that displayed advertisements to users via a downloaded program and rewarded them with money. The most famous of these was undoubtedly AllAdvantage, which paid its members a mere 50 cents an hour and became the standard other pay-to-surf websites were measured by.
It was during the tail-end of the pay-to-surf era in 2000 when Bepaid.com came along. Unlike their predecessors which paid members pennies an hour, Bepaid boasted rates upwards of $100 an hour, and guaranteed no less than $20 an hour. They also displayed full-screen ads, as opposed to the 468x60 banners other pay-to-surf websites displayed. Despite riding high on the excitement generated by these claims, Bepaid stumbled out of the gate when they simply didn't have enough ads to display to their members. The lack of advertisers was due both to the high prices, as well as internet advertising suffering as a whole due to dot-com bubble crash. As a result, few members actually saw any ads or made any money.
Bepaid seemingly ended about a year later during the September 11 attacks, as their offices were located on the 84th floor of the South Tower.