Over the past year, GameDaily BIZ has talked a lot about the ad supported casual games revolution. It's the latest trend across PCs and mobile to offer games free of charge, with an ad before, after or during an intermission of the game. Now, what if I told you that there was a site that was doing something like this... except it would pay you money to watch ads and play games?

It's something that sounds too good to be true, but Moola is a reality. Right now the service uses some simple games with which you essentially gamble with advertisers' money, and it also incorporates partner sites for free rewards by purchasing items. The company is looking to expand out, and hopes to add mobile phones and even consoles to the Moola service.

We caught up with Arlen Ritchie, CEO and founder of Moola, to talk about the Moola revolution.

Making Moola
Moola is such a unique offering that it's hard to imagine how it was even first envisioned. The idea of being paid directly by advertisers and partner sites for looking at their videos or purchasing their products is practically unprecedented. It's truly an innovation that benefits greatly from the advances in Internet technology; it surely wouldn't have even been possible a few years ago.

"I co-founded the company with my brother and now we've got a team of about 15 people. Originally, we envisioned [Moola] for mobile," explained Ritchie. "We thought, 'Let's crate a mobile game that people can play that's ad sponsored' but we quickly realized the North American mobile market wasn't developing quickly enough, so we built it on the web first and are going to mobile later. We've founded some patents worldwide to tie down the technology."

"Dell, Nokia, Best Buy, Geico, American Express, Yellow Pages, Chi-Chi's and Orbitz all have ads that run through our site. We monetize Moola using these ads; we generate CPC and CPA and CPM. We've started generating a lot of leads," he continued. "After the ads show, we have players answer a question about the ads, like if they noticed the color of the car, or they watch it again. It's worth noting that nobody has every complained about the ads. We don't have direct feedback from the advertisers yet, but everything we've heard so far is positive. We believe Moola is a good value proposition."

Sure, I'll gamble with your money
Moola is something so different, it defies current labels and descriptions. It's like a gambling site, except you gamble with advertisers' money and not your own. Because of the social aspects of Moola.com, the creators have labeled it a "Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game." Whatever it is, it was popular enough to attract 175,000 registered beta users without any self-promotion at all.

"We had our first private beta in 2006," said Ritchie. "It was invite only and we controlled growth slowly and deliberately with our server infrastructure, because people really responded well to this connection between games and free money. We've loosened the invite restrictions, allowing people to send invites themselves. Even without that, we already had 200,000 unique visitors a day to our site and we've registered 200,000 members, and that's completely through viral reference."

"[One of the biggest incentives to invite other people is that] you can win money via the games played by those you've invited," he added. "Your friends you refer win some money for you, up to four levels deep. We had over 32,000 invites and 100,000 plays and during this one Booster Blitz invite event that we had."

The masses of "Moolagans"
The appeal Moola has is immediate, and it's easy to see why it's caught on. After all, many people play casual games on the side to burn time anyway; why not do it to earn free money? Average payouts are generally in the $10 to $20 range, but some have already gone into four digits and there is no set limit.

It's a simple yet elegant idea, and while it sounds like a scam or a pyramid scheme, it has obviously proved out through the beta that it's not.

"Basically, they're addicted," responded Ritchie when asked about user feedback. "When they come to the site, their usage is off the charts. Once they get hooked in the forum, they're lifers. I can't even keep track of all the stuff on the forums it's so busy. They're our biggest viral senders, they're our defense from critics and doubters, they're everything to us. On average they're inviting people left and right; we had a three to five cap on invites, but we've recently opened it up."

"We give you a penny to start out with, and if you run out of pennies, we'll give you another one," he noted. "It allows you to play against other people for their money, but it's actually the advertising money; players can never deposit, but it's always free. We have introduced ways for people to fund themselves by purchasing merchandise on participating sites; no client necessary to download. We can let people know where you get cash back on the dashboard, and also let you know when you're on sites where you won't receive Moola rewards, but can go to a similar website where you can. People have created tournaments and their own lotteries and we have three pillars of earning and there's a meta game in climbing up the tower by making more money. A dozen people canceled their cash-outs because they wanted to be on the leaderboards!"

Pure gold
Moola is offering something unique in the advertiser sponsored gaming sphere. After all, there are a lot of ad sponsored game sites, but none but Moola actually pays you for the ads. It's something that has a lot of potential going forward, on the Internet and across other mediums as well

"Nobody's seen anything like this before," ventured Ritchie. "People see this and they think it's a network marketing scam, but when they find out it's free, they relax and have fun. The community forum helps people feel at ease; the checks say way more than we ever could!"

"The bottom line is that it plays on a lot of popular trends," he commented. "It combines things like casual gaming and gambling; it allows people to experience the highs of playing for real money without the lows. It also has the massively multiplayer experience. There's high value and high utility. There's real value and I think there's real excitement there as well."

"One of the advantages of the platform system is that it allows other publishers to enable their games [for Moola]. We want to have a massive footprint, beyond even mobile. Why not play a game of Halo 3 on Xbox Live for Moola?" concluded Ritchie.