AllAdvantage and Work24 go titsup.com

Dum. Dum. Dum. Another com bites the dust. Actually, since they're fading thick and fast, we've had to put two here so we can fit other stories on the front page.

So, farewell Scottish Power and the Royal Bank of Scotland's Work24.co.uk portal. You were a cracking idea but you pissed away £30 million and have nothing to show for it. And hark, you were an innovative concept AllAdvantage.com, but it just didn't work out and now you must go.

AllAdvantage has this to say (front page of site). "In 1999, AllAdvantage.com sought to build the first Internet infomediary to create truly interactive, one-to-one relationships... but we spent a small fortune and now no one wants to lose another fortune keeping a little Web site running for another six months, so we're titsup.com." [That bit after the ellipsis was our paraphrase.]

AllAdvantage sought to find ways of getting people to earn money while surfing and thus building itself a huge customer base. It didn't work. The Web site gives you instructions on how to remove the AllAdvantage viewbar from your computer.

OutofWork24

Interestingly, we have someone involved in Work24 that is willing to go on record to tell us what went wrong. That'll be Tony Price, head of computer e-tailer WStore -- one of the four or five partners that Work24 had.

Work24 was a business portal - computers, stationery etc etc - but when it said it would have 150,000 users by the end of this year, it was deluded. Yesterday, it was looking at 2,000, maybe more. Today, it looks at none.

Tony reckoned the concept was fuc... bloody excellent. But the portal wouldn't let him talk to customers direct - a touch stupid when you're talking about businesses making decisions. It also did the dotcom thing of blowing a fortune on advertising and getting nothing in return. Silly boys. ®