One of the most important life lessons that someone can learn is that there is truly nothing for free. I have often shared funny stories with friends of mine about our experiences being trapped in a place where a free meal was being offered to someone selling dodgy real estate (time share or some other such thing) deals, and friends of mine have undergone the same thing for free Disney tickets. Sooner or later, usually when we were unable to escape the sales pitch and had to endure it, we realized that the meal and the tickets were not free, and we simply withstand as best as we are able the inevitable sales pitch to make a very unwise financial decision. Yet to the extent we are wise (if foolish enough to have thought that meals or Disney World tickets were ever free), we will refrain from buying even if we do not understand exactly what a bad deal it is, because there should be some voice in our head telling us that someone would not be offering us something for free unless they were getting something out of it. The difficulty in life is figuring out what someone else wants from us or is getting from us.

Recently, I have discovered the large amounts of applications that can be installed on a smart phone, and many of the free apps (the ones I tend to get), are advertising-supported. This makes sense, because if you do not pay with the currency of the realm, you pay with the currency of attention and time. Either way, you always have to pay. This is not a new phenomenon. Anytime there has been a new media, there have only been a few ways for that media to pay, to support itself economically, and ad-based revenue is a traditional model that has proven to be profitable over the long term in print advertising, radio, television, and now is being offered for streaming as well as other online purposes. This is to be expected, and we all expect this as a matter of course. One of the things that has surprised me, though, is that there is a marked tendency in advertising for “free” apps that attacks the idea of the app being supported by advertising, arguing that a given app, unlike its fraudulent competitors, offers real money rewards for playing or idle app usage, and does not require the person to watch advertising, despite advertising being used to draw people to the app in the first place.

Even more notable than apps that purport to be free but which are ad-supported, which is easy enough to understand, are those apps that pay you for what are obviously non-productive activities, like playing solitaire or matching games on your computer. Some of these games appear to operate in a sweepstakes way, where the money is random and out of a given pot of money per day that is determined by what the makers of the app can support as far as payment out. Some of the apps appear to be more skill-based, often in competition with others who must all stake on the game and thus risk losing if they cannot place well enough to get their money or imaginary currency back. These zero-sum games mean that some people may profit but require others to lose. Some of the apps appear to be supported by various internet influencers, indicating that a substantial portion of the money that a company is willing to spend on its app is in hiring people to promote the app to large amounts of people who would then be willing to download it, indicating that there is something really going on with regards to the attention economy. Still other apps appear to be based on using someone’s cell phone to generate bitcoin mining or blockchains or something else relating to crypto.

One thing of interest is that unlike many normal transactions where it is clear what both parties want from the arrangement, it is not exactly clear why companies are willing to give you something of any value at all–even a small value–for you doing what would appear to be of no value whatsoever. Given the fact that many of the companies involved in making the apps are pretty transparently Chinese companies (though I have seen at least one Vietnamese company involved), and there are certainly American companies involved as well and likely European ones also, the lack of transparency about what is being given in exchange for the opportunity to make cash is concerning. Given that the apps nearly uniformly want information about a given user, including location tracking information and tracking the use of other apps, it seems very likely that a large part of what the app companies want is information, about travel patterns, locations the person goes, the money that they spend, and other habits. That information is well worth paying a few pennies on the dollar for, it must be admitted.