Friday, August 12, 2022

baffled by adverts

hi


every now and then i (quite) like to play a game or two on my camera what has, ostensibly, a phone welded to it. or, if you prefer, my phone what has a camera welded to it, look you see. this is reasonably if not fairly normal in the modern world, with many others doing so. as point of fact, i suppose, doing this makes me not quite so distracted from the present day as i often believe to be. 

generally, yes, i stick with the "free" games, thanks. but if this is a confession, then yes, once in a while, i think no more than 3 (three) times, i have bought "tokens" or credit or what have you to get past some levels or stages what proved tricky. aside from that, these games i play do rake in a great deal of money. quite a chunk of it, presumably, is off of the adverts they show in between goes, or levels. or present to you to get a "boost" to have another go. 

one theory, of a conspiracy nature, is that your phone (with camera welded, etc) is "always listening", and you can observe yourself getting adverts on websites or in games relating to what you have held conversations about. certainly i have noticed so. that said, my search history on the web appears not to inspire much in the way of selecting adverts to show me, for in games i am rarely, if ever, presented with ads for nuns, midgets, dwarfs (dwarves), middle aged bored british housewives or c0ck p!lls. in fact, and of course, it is the most frequent choice of adverts i get which has prompted this post. that and having nothing else better to write of, momentarily. 


a few months ago i would have been bombarded with the above advert three or four times a day, or however frequently i played a game. it's for something called clawee, which is apparently an online, or virtual (if you will) "claw machine" game. you know, them ones where you guide a claw like thing to pick up a prize, with the claw being too week or the prize being too heavy to ever win. up front, i must apologise for failing to grab a screenshot of the first "claw" player in the ad, a chubby central american, possibly mexican, looking kid who appeared to be either transitioning or otherwise coming to terms with and accepting a most peculiar sexuality. 

i do indeed understand the basic concepts of advertising; that ads exist to make whatever is being promoted highly desirable, attractive and what not so as to inspire an aspiration to obtain. but, well, really? whereas i am impressed with the sleek advert, in particular the delivery dude with bona fide classic "turkey teeth", is it really so there's a monumental number of people out there who play on these machines in order to get, usually, rudimentary stuffed teddy bear like toys? 

the most obvious, or overt, question about these "apps" i am being presented with adverts for is that of whether they are scams. in truth i have no firm idea, for i have not installed them and would not do so. highly likely, i would speculate, that there is a "catch". to state the obvious, they must in some way make more money off whatever it does than they spend running and advertising it, unless it is some insane corporate fronting it as a tax loss. more curious things have happened. 


currently i seem to be getting 2 (two) variations of an advert for something called mistplay of late. this one suggests that you can earn money simply by playing games off of your phone. what i like about this advert is the surreal nature. in either (or both) example i have seen, they have one (1) actress playing two roles, and all in conversation with each other. or herself. they kind of angle and present it to create a sense that maybe it's two different people. actually, a rather clever bit of film making and overall really wasted on an advert for something which certainly seems to be too good to be real. 

doing a google search on either of these is fascinating. mostly results for clawee come up with it being a scam, a ruse, and a "waste of money", which suggests no it isn't free. not so mistplay. a search on that comes up with a whole lot of virtually identically worded "reviews", all on official sounding sites with the site owner details being kept private, praising it. hmn.

how, then, do apps or games like this make money? i am guessing via you needing to pay "postage" for whatever they offer, or you having to make "in app purchases" and so on. certainly it won't be the old fashioned, earlier part of this century way of simple data harvesting. ever since people have carried smart phones, or installed all seeing, all listening, forever recording devices from amazon, google, apple and whoever in their homes, they have no need to harvest no more, the crops come to them. oh, well, if these ads mean i can play the odd game for free, so be it. 



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!






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