The websites that claim to host coupon codes are almost always invalid, what purpose are they serving the website host?
In: Economics
In the modern era, coupons have exactly one purpose, which is to serve as a measure of advertisement effectiveness. You give coupon codes to a streamer/YTer, or clip-out coupons to a magazine or newspaper or whatever. The code of the coupon is trackable, so if you use, for example, a coupon with the code “MarkiplierGamerSups” to buy expensive gatorade, the company that issued it now knows “that guy came here from Markiplier”
Enough such data, and they can map who or what they should advertise with, and they shotgun blast LOTS AND LOTS of these out. I’m a streamer with less than 100 daily views and I still get advertisement offers. However, companies generally will only be advertising with someone for a certain amount of time, so when they stop advertising, the coupons are no longer useful to the company. They are, for this reason, typically set to expire shortly after the ad campaign is over. Like, a couple of months after. Sometimes this is done with an expiration date, sometimes it’s done with a use limit (“The first 200 people to use this code will get…”).
The sites that host these are just trying to show you ad’s, just like everyone else. The quality of the site doesn’t matter that much, though I’m sure they try, but it’s a massive uphill battle to track the millions of quickly expiring codes. Either way, you go there looking to save money, and they make money off you by showing ads.
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