My Brief Fling with Extreme App Couponing
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My Brief Fling with Extreme App Couponing

Rewards apps purport to pay users for small tasks. I tried some out.

"…Lets Start Working… Last saturday I got a great Alfa Romeo after I been earning $9498 this past four weeks and a little over 10k lass month . with-out a doubt this is the nicest-work Ive ever had…"

Variations on the same "make money from home working online" appear on pretty much every site with a comments section. Spam blockers can only deter them for so long until they respawn. Even your great aunt who can't send email attachments knows by now that "MAKE MONEY FROM ONLINE" is spam.

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And yet these messages contain a small grain of truth. You can make money online. Sort of.

The App Store and Google Play are both full of apps that purport to pay users for small tasks. Usually these involve giving information about yourself, watching ads, or testing services. Each app puts its own spin on the familiar theme, with uniformly awful names like Swagbucks (earn gift cards for taking surveys) and CashPirate (the same, but for trying out apps). They spawn reviews and listicles, and have given rise to communities on Reddit like /r/beermoney, where the extreme couponers of the internet share their tips.

The apps' taglines are more coherent than comment spam: "Get Paid While You Shop," "Get Any Paid App for Free," "Earn Gift Cards for Playing Trivia." Buoyed by their promises, and fueled by curiosity and chronic stinginess, I find myself staring into a homescreen cluttered with these dubious names.

"Seems legit" is a phrase I repeat to myself several times during the writing of this article.

The apps I've downloaded—Rewardable, Perk Pop Quiz, Spare5, and AppJoy Video—are a combination of Reddit recommendations and others that are available in my country (many of the best-known only work in the US).

Even Apple seems undecided as to the legitimacy of reward apps, having reportedly banned services which incentivize video watching and social sharing in June last year only to roll back the decision a month later. Every click merits a leap of faith, and careful reading of yet another privacy policy. But they seem legit. "Seems legit" is a phrase I repeat to myself several times during the writing of this article.

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As the first thing every one of these apps wants from me is my Facebook profile, I create a new, fake one, and start app "couponing."

I begin with Perk Pop Quiz, part of the Perk family of apps, which also offers rewards for online shopping, watching live TV, and scanning receipts. The idea is that you allow Perk into your phone until it knows your every move, purchase, and choice of Sunday morning hangover viewing. In return, the apps reward you with "Perk points" which can be redeemed for vouchers or downloads.

Perk Pop Quiz is indeed perky. I switch on "Lightning Mode," which gives me only five seconds to answer questions.

I reach 144 points, but the app says the minimum I'll need is 26,000 for a $15 Amazon gift card. Between quizzes, pop-ups for other quiz apps appear. "Feeling smart today aren't we?" the screen reads, but the only quiz I get full marks on is in the category "Cosmetics." I wonder if this makes me a terrible person. I close the app and move on.

The next app, Rewardable, asks users to fill out information and download apps in return for in-app currency called Acorns. There are constant requests for referrals to friends and family, and it's very fond of surveys. Within five minutes Rewardable knows more about me than many real-life friends. Soon I've reached 8 cents (400 acorns add up to $1), and run out of available challenges.

My total now is 144 Perk Points and 8 cents. I close the app and move on.

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Spare5 rounds up low-commitment tasks you can do in five minutes, like checking the quality of stock images and the captions accompanying them. Dogs! Lots of pictures, of varying quality, but all of adorable dogs! Some appear to be taken from people's social media feeds. One is of a pug next to a bottle of gin. When I complete 20 captions I am rewarded with 20 cents. Across the screen it says "SOLID." For a second I think that it reads "SOLD."

The next task involves transcribing muffled phone calls which seem to be taken from phone lines in real-life businesses. I get one voice asking about the price of breakfast, another inquiring about opening hours. It feels intrusive.

Spare5 also wants to intrude on my life. "Tell us about yourself" is their first quiz, ostensibly used to test your suitability for more quizzes. When I have completed it I will be rewarded with 25 cents. What is my ethnicity, my gender, am I married or in a domestic partnership? I get into the swing of it, giving myself away piece by piece. Then suddenly Spare5 cuts me off: I don't qualify for the next quiz. Did I not fit the average? Or was I too average? What even is the average Spare5 user?

This is starting to feel like actual work. The FAQ assures me that they will pay out on Friday once I have earned over a dollar, a benchmark I have beaten by one cent, bringing my total earnings to 144 Perk points, $1 and nine cents. Yay!

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Next up: Appnana, also known as Appjoy. By now my poor outdated iPhone 4 is bloated with apps, slowing even as every external link I click sends me dancing at lightning speed between shady-looking ad sites. Appnana promises "nanas" in return for clicking links and filling out questionnaires. It strikes me as a lackadaisical approach to marketing, catering to those who want to be marketed to.

I click "Privacy Policy" over and over but it goes nowhere. I continue. I watch videos to get nanas. They are called videos, but really they are ads. I get five nanas for watching one about Palmolive soap. Five more for one about Volvic mineral water, with a young good-looking man with a moustache walking across a graffiti-covered landscape.

A questionnaire asks, do I work in the following fields? Advertising, Marketing/Sales, Cockroach sales…

Really? Is this a joke? Should I tick it, to show I'm still reading?

Then it tells me I'm not eligible to continue, and to have a nice day. I have earned 11,175 nanas, but the cheapest apps start at 30,000. I go back to watching ads; the next one is for Panadol. It feels calculated that right now they would try to sell me medicine for headaches.

The struggle is real—there are few options left but to download a suspicious looking gambling app (750 nanas) which I likely don't even have room for on my phone. I turn to Reddit's money-saving communities for advice, where online small job boards are catalogued: everything from Amazon's crowdsourced labour platform Mechanical Turk to "sharing economy" service Taskrabbit and the practise of "churning" (signing up for credit cards to claim rewards, then never using them).

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Reddit says to tell surveys that you're a female business owner—apparently this market segment is underrepresented and you'll get better rewards. The number of different apps is dizzying, and most of the questions on Reddit are about whether they're legit. All anyone seems to have won is app downloads, an obsessive cycle of clicking, answering questions, sending referrals, hustling, and clogging up phones with war games.

Across the screen it says "SOLID." For a second I think that it reads "SOLD."

It reminds me of the TLC show Extreme Couponing, in which suburban "couponeers" stage showdowns in supermarkets around America to save the most on shopping hauls. Any given episode sees contestants dashing through aisles, haemorrhaging little slips of paper cut from magazines and circulars, pulling down six packs of soda and crates of canned foods to load onto their trolleys. Couponing is a lifestyle, not an idle pursuit.

Sometimes the show will deliver a glimpse of a basements and garages in which extreme couponers store their hauls, hoards even apocalypse preppers would balk at. Rewards apps are no different, really, except the space they occupy is virtual. Making progress would require far more than the odd "Spare5": it would mean spending every waking minute swiping and typing, giving away more personal information than I think I have to give.

In the end, the main thing I take from my time as rewards app user is the reminder of how we use and are used by our devices every day. The quizzes aren't all that different to how Facebook encourages us to fill out our profiles, the slow process of constructing a human shadow to target to based on likes, dislikes, age, marital status and propensity to work selling cockroaches…

Every move we make generates data: rewards apps are just a little less subtle about its value, showing your actual human worth to a machine. Which in my case is 144 Perk Points, 11,175 nanas, 40 acorns, and $1.09.