What counts as a verified impression

Ad fraud is the reason rewarded browsing has a bad reputation. If a product pays per impression and does not check the impression, the fastest way to earn is to fake it, and the advertisers paying for it leave. So the interesting part of a product like this is not what it pays. It is what it refuses to pay for.

The ad has to actually render

Tributly shows one 44px sponsored strip at the top of the page. It is a single slot, and the extension pushes the page down to make room for it rather than drawing over the content. Nothing is credited from a slot that never painted, so a hidden, collapsed, or blocked strip earns nothing.

It has to be on the tab you are looking at

A slot lasts seven seconds and only counts against the tab that is actually in front of you. Background tabs, minimized windows and inactive pages do not accumulate impressions, which rules out the oldest trick in the category: leaving a hundred tabs open overnight.

There is a floor on how fast impressions can count

The server refuses to credit two impressions closer together than six seconds, regardless of what the browser reports. That single rule puts a hard ceiling on how much one account can produce in an hour, and it is enforced where it cannot be edited, on our side rather than in the extension.

The money moves in one accountable step

When an impression passes, the advertiser is charged and your balance is credited in the same transaction, in a double-entry ledger. Money is never credited to a user without being debited from a campaign, so the sum of every balance always equals the sum of what advertisers actually paid. There is no pool of promised earnings that is not backed by a real charge.

Then the caps

Even after all of that, credited earnings stop at $5.00 a day and $20.00 a week per account. The checks above make a single fake impression hard. The caps make a farm of them pointless, because the ceiling is low enough that industrialising it earns less than it costs.

None of this requires your browsing history. Verification needs to know that an ad rendered, on an active tab, at a given time. It does not need to know what page you were on.