Dark Spot for Brightspot (Sheep Shed Their Wool)

BrightSpot.TV, a site covered here before, has shut down. I wrote back in August, “…You’d think the one thing we need a break from is advertising. Yet sheep that we are, we can’t get enough of it.” I guess we can get enough of it after all.
Yesterday, BrightSpot sent members this message: “BrightSpot Media would like to thank
all of our valued members for participating on BrightSpot.TV and taking
advantage of the partnerships that we had established. We regret to
inform you that as of Monday November 19th, 2007 the BrightSpot.TV site
will no longer be available.”
We’ll see if some other ad-focused sites can avoid BrightSpot’s fate, including Didja, VeryFunnyAds, and Firebrand. The major difference is that BrightSpot was trying to reward people to watch ads that, for the most part, weren’t very good, and the functionality itself was pretty poor, as the ads weren’t designed to go viral. These other sites provide the reward of entertaining advertising rather than anything monetary, and they focus on providing a good experience to watch, interact with, and share the ads, with each site offering its own twist. That sounds both less complicated and more promising as a model – as long as the ads are really that good.