How do apps that pay real money make money?
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Most commonly: ad revenue, or through the sale of aggregated data that they’re collecting about users. If an app’s “product” is free to you, it’s likely that you are the product.
The amount they pay you is a fraction of what they make on Ad revenue.
These apps are also likely collecting personal or behavioral data on you that they are in turn selling.
Many of these apps also pay out so infrequently that they pay chump change for significant amounts of work.
For others they pay out randomly, so it’s basically gambling and wasting your time.
Business models vary wildly, but it’s always some variation of the youtube model: a combination of ads and premium subscriptions.
The business model for these apps are to generate most of the revenue through ads and collecting the user data . The more time you spend on their server the more money they going to make by channelizing your mindset into one direction
A lot of the time they don’t. Don’t pay real money, that is. It’s a short-term scam. Get you to watch their ads until you realize no payday’s coming, rinse and repeat for a million people.
Apps that a user pays into and wins money in are often referred to as Real Money Gambling (RMG) and the general way these types of apps make money is through a good Return To Player (RTP). If a player of a RMG app gets back on average 95% of what they put in they will think they made money but often have lost some, some players will make more than they put in but they are offset by players who lose most / all of what they put in.
Additionally as others have stated selling data about you or serving you ads is another way to generate revenue. Apps / Businesses that provide a service for free generally operate in this way, for example facebook.
Paid premium services such as added functionality can also be a significant revenue stream for some businesses such as Linked In.
Additionally you might see some apps giving a joining bonus like an extra $10 to sign up, acquiring users via ads is expensive, it can cost a lot of money to buy an install of an app so this kind of marketing is generally cost effective as odd as it might seem.
Source: App Developer for a major RMG / Social Casino company.
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