There are adverts about games that say you can generate ridiculous amounts of money just by doing/playing x. Although this is obviously not efficient for the user, how do companies that claim these things gain profit?
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Another thing to keep in mind is that such companies are not necessarily making a profit at all.
It is common to imagine a company starts small doing something that makes a few bucks of profit, then reinvests that profit in growth until they are massive and raking in the cash required to support themselves. That isn’t the only path though.
There are many businesses where you can’t start really small and make money. You can’t really profit by selling gas out of a hand cart like a hotdog vendor, you need a station that costs millions to build. You can’t really have a mom and pop steel foundry operating from the backyard shed.
Instead businesses start by attracting investors that will give money to allow the company to grow and operate during a phase where they don’t make money, but actually lose it. Also the goal often isn’t to grow to the point that they grab significant market share from the major players in the industry. Instead the goal is to at some point be bought out by one of the major companies for a price that will recoup the investment.
The interesting factor here is that the company *never needs to be profitable!* They just need to be interesting enough to be bought out, and one way is to have a large user base that can be sold along with the company to a bigger buyer. If a big company wants to start an app it may make more sense to purchase a user base of millions of people rather than spending years trying to build it themselves and perhaps even failing.
So your question of how they gain profit may not even be applicable.
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