Make your day-to-day activities profitable, the promise of these new applications
Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to use some of your time in order to earn some money, without changing any of your habits? That’s a bet many apps have been willing to take.
Gaming apps
Regular people spend an average time of 56 minutes a day playing on their smartphones. What if I told you that you could make this time worth some cash?
Some specific apps offer this kind of service and rewards their users for playing games on their phones. The principle is simple: while playing, users earn some points, which can be traded for gift cards or money. One of those apps is Mistplay, whose slogan is:
“Play games for cool prizes, download it to have nothing to lose and money to gain”. How does it work though?
There are several types of points you can earn:
- GXP (Game eXperience Point), which depend on the amount of time you have spent on games. For each game, there is a scale in which for every level you complete, you earn some units.
- Units: these correspond to the money from Mistplay itself. The units can be redeemed for gift vouchers (Amazon, MasterCard, GooglePlay, Yves Rocher, Marionnaud, Carrefour, Nintendo and Spotify).
The steps are divided as follows:
The applications display a selection of games. Mistplay offers about 50 games that all have the same levels, but with a different value: the profitability of GXP is variable between 0.5 (10 units per level) and 5 (125 units per level).
This interesting principle does not only exist for games. Walking can also bring you money.
Walking apps
The World Health Organization and the Heart Foundation state that in order to remain healthy, you have to walk about 10,000 steps a day. This is not a simple goal for most of us. Pedometer applications have been created for many years to help us achieve this goal by approximately counting our steps every day. What if this score could also allow you to earn money?
WeWard is an app that pays you to walk. Its pedometer interface records every step you take every day. At the end of your day, you validate your steps and earn points: the wards. You can then convert your wards into gift vouchers or cash. Easy, right?
But how much do you make exactly? Here is the WeWards barometer.
Each Ward equals 0.7€ (or 100 wards = 0.70€). WeWard offers different possibilities to exchange your Wards for prizes: bank transfers, gift cards, coupons, raffles and… donations to associations! So, when do you start?
How are these applications profitable?
Let’s be honest, making money without any particular effort seems impossible. So how do these applications offer such possibility?
Their commercial offering is based on three principles:
1- Partnerships with brands (shops or games). The brands pay the apps to access your data and, quite simply, you/your attention. These brands appear on the app and allow you to earn points when you play or visit them in the real life. For brands, you represent a potential customer.
2- Sponsorship. Apps reward you if you convince your family and friends to install and actively use the app. Thus, you earn additional points, and the application earns additional users (so their data, to resell to partner brands, to come full circle).
For example:
Mistplay: you will earn 100 units when the person you are sponsoring redeems a gift card.
WeWard: you win 20 Wards when the person you are sponsoring reach 150 Wards.
3- Cashback. When you shop at partner stores (games or physical shops), you get extra bonus points (GXP or Wards). Thus, you earn extra points while the app earns a commission.
My experience
I am not going to leave you despondent and close my article like that. Of course, I tested Mistplay and WeWard… and here is my point of view !
Regarding Mistplay: my goal was to reach enough units to finance a 15€ voucher at Nintendo worth 4,900 units. For this, I played 25 games, during 51h29min over 17 days. My total gaming experience was 461,557 GXP.
Concerning WeWard : my goal is to win a bank transfer of 20€ worth 3,000 Wards. To date, I have won 181 Wards by walking about 10,000 steps for 4 days, watching videos and completing WeWards challenges.
In conclusion, Mistplay and WeWard are great apps to earn money or gift vouchers for free. The concept is original, free, and easily accessible. It’s reassuring to know where the money you get in the end comes from.
The downside is that winning units or Wards takes a long time. The initial principle is to make your daily time profitable, without extra effort and without changing your habits. While this is easy to set up for WeWard (we rarely want to walk 5,000 more steps to win 3 extra Wards), it is harder for Mistplay. There is no limit of play time per day, and each game has its own steps that allow you to win units. In other words, «play more to gain more GXP». Mistplay tends to make us addicted: the more active time you spend on games, the more rewarded you get in GXP (and therefore in units). Spending more than 50 hours to earn 15€ raises the question of the profitability of this type of application.
Have you used any of these or similar applications? Have you managed to use them in your daily life without changing your habits? Let me know in the comments below.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
