The rise of internet bartering

That was odd. I wanted to install Stuffit 9 Premium (which has some nice features like segmentation) which is ordinarily $50 (but which somehow comes with the Mac?) and Smithmicro said it was free. But I had to accept an offer. This offer was brokered by a company called Trialpay - and I could select anything from a credit card sign up, a subscription to the Economist magazine, or a trial of "Blockbuster Total Access".

Actually, I think this was extremely well done. Early attempts at this sort of thing were incredibly crude and offputting, often forcing the user to go through many pages of worthless offers. In this case they only had 6 pretty good offers.

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