Yesterday, DollarFor99Cents.com closed its doors, bringing down the final curtain on the dot-com collapse. Their business model, giving away free money to each site visitor, made it one of the most visited sites on the web, but was ultimately unsustainable.

The company started at the height of the dot-com boom, in late 1998, and quickly became one of the most popular sites on the web. "People were joking about giving away money, but when we really thought about it, it actually sounded like a good idea", said John Yu, founder and CEO of DollarFor99Cents.com. "We brainstormed the concept all night, and 7 days later we were live."

The fledgling site soon got attention from the digerati, and then visitors exploded. "After registering your credit card and personal information, your account would be credited with one cent. You could do this once a day, every day", explained Yu. "Word got around the net pretty quick".

"It was the perfect dot-com business model," said Victor Nolan, of Luni Ventures, who funded the startup. "The site was sticky -- the customers had to come back each day, and the customer acquisition cost was cheap -- one cent -- compared to tens or even hundreds of dollars for some other sites".

DollarFor99Cents.com hoped to make money on banner ads, and for a while, was successful at charging high rates. But as ad rates fell, and users started to acquire "banner blindness", revenue fell dramatically.

And further problems were caused by the market they were targeting. "Would you really want to advertise on a site that only attracted cheapskates?" commented Bill Wzcelsa, an analyst who specializes in internet stocks.

Finally, short of cash, DollarFor99Cents.com took a bold step -- they switched to a subscription model. "It was a risk we had to take", said Yu. "We upped the reward in exchange for the upfront subscription fee. For only $2.95 a month, they could get 10 cents a day, which would still be profitable for our customers, except February, of course."

This gambit failed however. The introduction of the subscription fee killed their user base and drove down revenues further. As they ran out of cash, they faced the inevitable, and closed their doors. "I think it was a great idea," says Yu, "I'm still not sure what went wrong."