Monday, April 11, 2016

Fake Ads as a Business Model

Ole Begemann (tweet):

The problem is I really hate advertising, so I would probably not add ads to my app. I simply wouldn’t want to expose my users to tracking, nor would I want to support the ad industry in general.

But what about fake ads? Why not add a distracting (but totally fake) rotating banner to the app whose sole purpose is to induce people to pay to get rid of it? There would neither be user tracking, nor would you have to add shady third-party code from a dozen app networks to your binary.

Nicolas Seriot:

this is more or less the late 90s shareware model

Bogdan Popescu:

I used to have a funny & annoying banner in Dash to get users to pay. Didn’t work out so well. It’s an OS X app though.

“Please purchase to skip waiting” works great for me. Would be interesting to see how it’d do on iOS.

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