alt Hacker NewsOne of my first professional coding jobs was in 2007 when Facebook first introduced 'Facebook Apps'. I worked for a startup making a facebook app, and EVERY SINGLE app company had the same monetization strategy: Selling ads for other facebook apps.
So the lifecycle of an app would be:
1) Create your game/quiz/whatever app.
2) Pay a successful app $x per install, and get a bunch of app installs.
3) Put all sorts of scammy "get extra in game perks if you refer your friends" to try to become viral.
4) Hope to become big enough that people start finding you without having to pay for ads.
5) Sell ads to other facebook app startups to generate installs for them.
It was a completely circular economy. There was not product or income source other than the next layer of the pyramid.
It didn't last long.
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Yes I remember those days! I joined a startup whose first product was a Facebook app in 2007. We were right around the corner from Facebook HQ on Forest and High, and we were alpha partners for the launch of Pages. We created a feature film streaming app (the learning was: no one watches 100-minute videos on Facebook). While we never intended to be a Facebook-app company, technically it was the first thing we launched.
Fast forward 18 years, and the company is going strong with millions of subscribers and distributing Oscar winning films such as Demi Moore’s The Substance.
That sounds pretty fishy, but in my head, that's what an economy is. There aren't a lot of new inputs into the system. It's just a circulatory system of value moving around. The only new inputs would be things like mines, oil wells, and other outside forces. Labor is too I guess but I think it's less raw.
To be quite honest, in many ways AI itself feels a bit "scammy" sometimes. The biggest case for it seems to be how to shit one million garbage apps by snapping your fingers, while problems that are really hard to solve go unaffected.
What a beautiful microcosm of the attention economy.
Aren't most ads in scummy mobile games ads for other scummy mobile games, to this very day?
Hate to break it to you, but it’s still going on, just outside the fb app api.