Tripod, one of many free web-hosting companies, announced a new program today that will actually pay owners of homepages that generate a certain amount of hits per day.

The rates are $1.00 for every 1000 ad impressions your site serves, which is pretty slim to say the least; sure it could add up over time - at 5,000 impressions a day you're pulling in $1,800US a year so don't quit the day job yet. It sounds to me like they're giving you a small percentage of the money they're already making off the annoying banner ads that are served from your Web pages anyways.

Get all the gory details here.