TOKYO — Would you subject yourself to ads showing on your lock screen, in exchange for never paying for data?
PopSlide, from Singapore-based YoYo Holdings, is a mobile ad platform that lets users earn points by reading ads on their smartphone's lock screen — which can be quite often, given that users in some countries check their phones at least 50 times a day. When they collect enough points, they can redeem those for data or minutes on their phones.
The company claims that a typical user can earn an average of 72 hours' worth of data — enough to cover a month's worth of usage, on average.
So far, it's already attracted major advertisers like McDonald's, Unilever, Nestle and Intel.
It initially ran a browser-based beta called Candy in the Philippines in 2013, which became a hit, attracting 30,000 users in three weeks.
YoYo then launched PopSlide there in August 2014. This year, after expanding to Indonesia and Vietnam, it has attracted 800,000 downloads across the three countries, YoYo’s founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada told Mashable.
He said he wants to give “the next billion” at the bottom of the global economic pyramid free mobile access. “In this world, there are plenty of big problems, like education, food, health care, energy, so I went for one of the biggest and most difficult problems — poverty,” the former DeNAmarketing manager says.
Unlike the majority of post-paid smartphone users in countries like Japan, where Fukada is from, many users in emerging countries like the Philippines and Indonesia don’t have bank accounts and must pre-pay for their phone usage. He hopes earning points will appeal to this base, where people can charge their phones before the new month.
Fukada says telcos love the concept because low-income users are no longer constrained by their budgets, with the advertisers footing the data bill. More data being used means more income for the telcos.
He says PopSlide tries to target the ads by age, gender and GPS location in order to avoid being annoying.
PopSlide isn't the only app showing lock screen ads. South Korean company Slidejoy launched last year and pays users cash. According to TechCrunch, users stand to earn $6 per month on average, but some users have complained that the payout is too low.
There are other apps that employ slightly different reward mechanisms as well. An app called mCent from Jana rewards users with airtime for trying out apps. The payout for its Indian users, for example, can be about 13 rupees (US$0.20) worth of mobile data as a reward for downloading and trying chat app Line, or 28 rupees (US$0.40) for trying Saavn.
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