Compete and ROOT.net are attempting to put advertisers together directly with "consumers" where these "consumers" are more like "users". Yes, these users voluntarily share interests and these sites match "offers" with their users that have declared their interest in these products.

Root VAULTS (Disclaimer: I used to blog for them.) hasn't started making offers to consumers. Right now, their ROOT.net service is a place where people can collect, store, analyze and share the websites that they visit. They are taking the very high road, supporting the principles of AttentionTrust.

Compete is a bit more commercially focussed. I've downloaded the toolbar. Through some greasemonkey (I presume) magic, they insert little icons in my google results pages that tell me whether the site is trustworthy, how many people have visited the site (using their toolbar visitors as a proxy), and whether there are any special deals available at the site. (You can see these icons in their Yahoo powered search too.)

I am not sure how Compete is bringing back the "deals" available at other sites, but they are. Here's an example. They must be using some fancy algorithmic searching. It's pretty clever. I imagine a sharp programmer could do this off of the Yahoo API or Amazon's S3 API by searching on a specific site for specific phrases like "x% off".

Compete has also introduced Compete Points that can be earned by filling out surveys. (I imagine they are using my search history to determine whether I am a good candidate to fill out a specific survey.) There are still no surveys available for me. And they don't have a point redemption program yet. But, they say it'll earn me Amazon Gift Certificates when they develop the functionality.

Overall, Compete is pulling together some interesting capabilities to create a fairly compelling reason for me to share my browser history. But, it seems kind of hobbled together at this point. I like the fact that ROOT has more focus and follows AttentionTrust principles. But, Compete has a few more compelling reasons to use the site. We'll see if either get enough traction among users to create a compelling reason for advertisers to flock to the service, and cut publishers out of the equation.