Gamesville

Gamesville is a casual gaming portal founded in 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts by Steven Kane, Stuart Roseman and John Furse. Gamesville was acquired in 1999 by Web portal Lycos for $232 million in stock. Gamesville’s tagline is "Wasting your time since 1996".
History
Founded on a minimal capital base, Gamesville operated not just as a games provider but as a targeted marketing operation, offering free games and prizes to members as a way to attract large numbers of users while tailoring their proprietary games to meet the demands of advertisers. To play, members must provide demographic information; in turn, members would receive targeted ads based on the demographics provided. Gamesville pioneered the use of interstitial advertising as a method of monetizing game players.
Gamesville's first game, The Bingo Zone, enabled hundreds of people to compete against one another in real time, for free, and win up to $20 by getting a bingo. Initially, Kane...