DIGITAL L.A. FORGET THOSE TV GAME SHOW - GET RICH WATCHING THE NET.

Byline: David Bloom 

If you can't get them to visit your Web site any other way - like with scintillating entertainment content or incredibly valuable information or great shopping deals - maybe buying viewers is the best way to go. At least so it seems in one interesting recent Web trend.

iWON.com (www.iwon.com) has run a series of often funny ads advertising its search engine that will pay some lucky user $10 million (and others lesser amounts) for clicking on it instead of, say, Alta Vista or Yahoo! for information.

Now the company has cut a deal to run a half-hour show (airing at 8 tonight on CBS Channel 2), hosted by Leeza Gibbons, where four finalists will discover which gets that $10 million, and who splits lesser prizes like $1 million, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and vacations. Two viewers of the show will win $50,000 each.

What's interesting about this is the crossover back to Old Media by a Web company that's basically running a legal lottery (or sweepstakes, depending on the regulations in your state) to entice users and now, viewers.

Other companies are also making bold bucks-for-eyeballs plays. For instance, at the nearly identically named (and capital-letter-challenged) iwin.com (www.iwin.com), a Las Vegas man just won $1 million in the site's Lotto-like game. The site, which offers a bunch of more skill-based games, gives away all kinds of prizes, most of which you can win by accruing the site's faux currency, ``iCoins,'' when you play well.

It's more purely gambling over at the forthrightly named Jackpot.com (www.jackpot.com), which makes its money by replacing the traditional images such as cherries and lemons on a progressive slot machine with the logos of advertisers. Get three of the same logo at once and you'll take home up to $2 million.

That top prize is guaranteed to be given away at least every three months (because it's progressive, the winning amount swells daily until someone hits the jackpot.com), along with monthly lesser goodies such as BMW sports cars, DVD players, vacations and diamonds.

And finally, Gist.com (www.gist.com) is actually willing to pay people $100 for the month's ``most clever and insightful'' postings on its 11 television ``FanClubs,'' which are discussion areas devoted to shows such as the World Wrestling Federation, ``Ally McBeal,'' ``The X Files,'' ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' ``Friends'' and ``ER.''

Gist does offer some entertaining services for the TV mad, such as interactive programming listings (also seen on a number of large sites around the Web), celebrity bios and entertainment news.

Paying for customers may gin up some traffic, but I can't imagine iWON, iwin or Jackpot doing this for many years to come. Eating up all your investment capital in multimillion-dollar chunks like this sure makes it hard to create a sustainable business.

On the other hand, if they're writing you that fat check, you're not worried about anything but whether the check clears the bank. So line up and play, if it so suits you.

The Gist offering comes with its own perils, mostly for excessive exposure to purple prose. As if some Web wackos need any encouragement to wax excessively poetic and clever on the world's biggest soapbox, the site is now giving them the chance to actually get paid for the privilege.

Honest, we journalists keep harping about the need for gatekeepers for reasons besides just wanting to keep our own jobs at the gate. Some people shouldn't be encouraged by a possible paycheck to sound off.

As an antidote, Gist ought to offer a secondary award, similar to the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Prize (``It was a dark and stormy night ...'') awarded for the most over-the-top opening paragraph of (we hope) never-made novels. A similar booby prize for excessive Gist-ation might keep to a managable level the cuteness and cussedness that's otherwise sure to break out. We can only hope.

< That '00s Show

``That '70s Show'' wins no prizes for original title, but it may win one for most interesting use of the Internet by a television show this month. The Fox comedy is now putting a weekly look behind the scenes at its Web site (at www.that70sshow.com), just before the TV show is broadcast.

New behind-the-scenes episodes in a streaming format premiere online, half an hour before the show's 8 p.m. Monday broadcast.

And the program garnered a lot of Web interest: Where the site normally gets 175,000 viewers on March 27, the first day of the behind-the-scenes looks, traffic spiked to more than 1.2 million.

My head spins trying to deconstruct the meaning of a show about a show on a medium that effectively didn't exist (for 98 percent of Americans) at the time portrayed in the original show. Got that?

Other sites are beginning to do this sort of behind-the-scenes look at the filming of movies. But be warned, O starry-eyed ones: watching a film being made generally is about as glamorous and action-packed as listening to corn grow. And worst of all, on the Net you can't go visit the commissary.

SITE OF THE WEEK

--Lord of the Rings: The official Web site of the movie being made of the beloved fantasy trilogy once voted Book of the (last) Century.

--Where: www.lordoftherings.net

--What's cool: The addition to this site of a two-minute trailer of early shots from the movie, now less than halfway through 14 months of shooting in New Zealand, with a December 2001 release date, attracted a whopping 1.7 million downloads its first day. With more than 1,200 visual effects shots (for comparison, ``Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace'' had 1,000 VFX shots; no one else is even close), the movie should be a treat for the eyes. The trailer certainly is. You'll wish you had (or be glad you have) a fast broadband connection, and you'll need the free Apple QuickTime browser plug-in (available at the site) to view it all, but it's worth it. It looks great. Be careful about that address, however; www.lordoftherings.com takes you to a site owned by another company, with little now but a long list of links (also useful for hardcore fans) of other Lord of the Rings sites.

--Features: Other than the trailer from New Line Cinema, there's not a ton of other stuff here yet, but there is a place to submit questions for an ``Ask the Director'' segment, a brief audio interview of director Peter Jackson, and overpriced editions of the book with a special authenticated letter from Jackson. There's also a program that dresses up your Web browser with various Ring motifs. Give your Web experience that Straight Outta Moria look that sets every Orcsta's heart a-thumpin'.

--You'll like this if: You want to know how you'll be spending your Christmas 2001 holidays.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo: no caption (Web site)

Box: SITE OF THE WEEK (See text)