You were probably too young to be aware that such things ever even existed (particularly given your background), but there was a time when people did try, and a few succeeded, at clicking on the Internet to make money for a living.

Long before the ad-blocking tech race, long before Facebook, there were sites collectively known as click exchanges. You would view other people's pages that they wanted to advertise (which most of the time, would be their own referral pages to other click exchanges or get-rich-quick-from-the-Internet schemes), and in exchange you'd get "credits" which could be exchanged for visitors to pages that you wanted to advertise. In some cases, you could even sell those page views to others.

Many of these click exchanges came with their own referral programs, and when combined with all the other schemes out there in the Internet's earlier days, quite a few crafty people were able to cobble together a decent living out of "clicking on the Internet". These days, the world and its people are far more tech-savvy. Clicking on the Internet to make a living won't happen again, unless there's some kind of idle-clicker game out there that actually pays monetary rewards/prizes and we just don't know about it yet.