Hello, You've Got Game Show! Viewers dig "Gold Rush," a new Internet series from reality TV's Mark Burnett. Here's how he made AOL a "Survivor."

Byline: Johnnie L. Roberts

Last week on "Gold Rush": who walked away with $1 million in genuine gold bars? Was it Michael Kearney of Memphis, who holds a world record for graduating college at 10? Was it David Delaserda, the unemployed single dad of two from Freemont, Ohio? Or was it one of the 16 others who survived a barrage of pop-trivia quizzes, charades and treasure hunts in their coast-to-coast battle for the gold.

If you couldn't find the Nov. 9 finale of "Gold Rush" on any of your 500 cable channels, that's because it wasn't there. It was on the Internet. And nearly 11 million users have tuned in. Chalk up another home run for reality-TV king Mark Burnett, the man who changed the rules--and economics--of television with "Survivor" and "The Apprentice." Now he's applying his lucrative formula to a Web confection that's helping long-suffering AOL in its quest to reclaim the gold itself.

"Gold Rush" was a hybrid online reality game. Each week, the site featured rounds of questions and puzzles--and to solve many of them users had to look for clues on other AOL-owned sites like MapQuest; in the pages of the site's magazine partners, Star, People, TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, and on CBS shows like Burnett's "Survivor" and the new series "Ghost Whisperer" (crafty cross-promotion, huh?). The three people who answered correctly and the fastest were then whisked to Atlanta, New York or another city, where they faced off in front of Webcams for a $100,000 prize. Last week those winners competed for the final $1 million prize, which ran on AOL and on "Entertainment Tonight," a CBS-syndicated show. "When you're a prodigy and have read the classics by age 5 and graduated college at 10," says Kearney, now 22, "you don't have much else to do but delve into all sorts of trashy stuff." (Kearney won.)

If online entertainment ever becomes the mass medium of choice, the trashy stuff that is "Gold Rush" will be remembered as a stroke of genius. It debuted online at AOL.com in early September, about the same time the broadcast networks launched their fall seasons. Dubbed an "interactive reality game," it's notable for a number of firsts. As Internet content, it's remarkable for holding audiences' attention. "Gold Rush" has also taken product placement to new extremes: let's call it "advertainment," in which the products from advertisers like Chevrolet, Coke Zero and Best Buy are entertainment, integrated into the ...