A US company is to give-away 100,000 "free" monitors to help launch itself into the online advertising market. Broadscape will offer the 19in colour monitors to US consumers from March next year, with plans to introduce a similar offer in the UK by the end of 2000. Using the same principle as US company Free-PC.com, applicants get free kit in return for agreeing to provide personal information to the company. The monitors will also display customised adverts when users are online. This will consist of an ad messaging frame on the right hand side and bottom of the screen, run by Broadscape's Always on Top software. When users are not online the adverts will disappear, leaving the full 19in screen. There is a minimum agreement of ten hours online usage per month for 36 months, although users are free to use any ISP. Broadscape said it had signed a deal with MyWay.com, a CMGI affiliate, to provide customised content, including the Altavista search engine, for a co-branded start page. The monitors will be built and serviced by KDS, part of Korea Data Systems. The New Orleans company had already received 9000 applications via its Web site, according PC World News. Broadscape CEO Anthony Salvaggio said: "We wanted to have something that is technologically trouble free. [ISP] deals are too complicated. This way we don't have to worry about people getting busy signals." But Broadscape applicants will never quite escape the advertising loop. At the end of the 36 months users will get to keep the monitors, but ads will continue to be displayed whenever they are online. ® Details of the monitors on offer can be found here