People are setting up multiple phones to create a “phone farm” to fake engagement with ads to earn money from certain apps. Vice spoke to several farmers and built their own setup.
With a marketing strategy called “incentivized traffic,” app developers take advertisements or other content that companies want to get in front of an attentive audience, and pay that audience to watch or interact with them.
Rather than actually watch ads, these phone farmers use as many as a hundred phones and sometimes automate the process to make it seem like someone is watching the ads in order to generate income.
Check It Out: Meet America’s Phone Farmers That Commit Ad Fraud
Okay but let’s be honest here. Haven’t we all clicked on the “Watch this ad to get X” button and then done something else while it was playing? These people are just doing it on a larger scale.