Here's how passive earnings will look in 2017.

Hey guys.

With the recent news of perk's acquisition by RhythmOne, a lot of people are saying that these are the 'final days' of Passive video apps. There have been a lot of thoughts about passive earnings going into the next year, and based on my experience being a farmer since April 2014, as well what I have noticed and heard from several connections, a lot of these comments are blatantly incorrect. There are a lot of things people say about passive earning apps that when I read them, I cannot disagree more with their incorrectness. I'm not going to say that I know everything or that I will be 100% correct in what I write in this post, but I just want to make things clear for some people, and make the best predictions for the future as I can, based on what I already know. I might leave things open for you to guess what will happen, but I want to at least lay out the facts.

I'm going to start off with a more common argument that 'passive apps are dead, and that the advertising agencies are shutting down their ad supply for passive apps'.

This is both correct and incorrect. If anything, over the last year we have actually seen more ad companies showing up in our passive apps. The issue comes when an app like Perk says 'hey, let us show your ads in our apps!' the ad agency will look at Perk, evaluate what is going on, and monitor it. If the ad agency looks at perk and sees that it is just throwing ads at people to make money, there's a chance they will say 'oh, no. We don't want you doing that'. And that ad agency is out of the picture. There are more mobile advertising providers than you might think... We only see a few of them, because they are the only ones that are OK with what these passive apps are doing. For example, Earnhoney wants more mobile advertisers. So they apply to get different ads from different providers. We'll use tremor for example. Tremor will look at Earnhoney, and more than likely say 'okay, sure. fine whatever'. And they will allow Earnhoney to access some of their ad supply. Tremor is just a great example, because they don't give a shit where their views are coming from. They want as many people to watch the ads they have to show because they make money too. For every $10,000 perk makes on ads from Tremor, you need to consider that Tremor is probably making $10,000 as well. And we are making $750.

Now to bring another layer to this statement, you also need to realize that passive apps are generally unknown to the advertisers. The issue of 'ad agencies shutting down passive apps' is not the issue. The issue is the advertisers shutting down passive apps by finding out and boycotting the ad providers that allow their ads to run in passive apps. Of course this is really fucking far stretched because if you really think about it, there are multiple thousands of apps that have these same ads that we are seeing in our passive apps. A very large majority of the views are coming from these apps that are not as blatantly raping the ad views like these passive apps. An advertiser who is looking to advertise with an ad agency will see these nice apps, where you play a game for 15 minutes, and once the game is over in order to start the next game you must watch one of their ads (and no, not Perk Pop Quiz, like an actual game where you don't get paid for playing).

Passive apps are just a small drop in the bucket when it comes to a major business getting into mobile advertising. And no, some people found an article that says that companies should steer away from mobile advertising because it's hard to track the success of mobile ad campaigns, but really... one article saying bad things about mobile advertising is not enough to keep advertisers out of mobile advertising. That article will not have any major impact (this post was big on /r/perktv a few weeks ago. All the comments seemed to say that this article was the beginning of the end of passive.. It's really not). Unless something huge happens, we really won't see passive earnings change much in 2017.

So, how will Perk be changing? Who fucking knows. It really will depend on several factors. I'll lay out the facts and we'll see what actually ends up happening.

For starters, we can look back up about what I said about the ad agencies there already are. Some of them are fine with passive apps, and others are not. What about RhythmOne? Who the fuck knows? They have never dipped into passive apps (please correct me if I am wrong) and we have never seen their ads. For all we know, nothing will change and they will continue to avoid dipping into passive apps. However, from what I am guessing, they may have seen Perk as an extremely popular business with a large userbase, and they may have seen what other ad agencies are doing (particularly Tremor ads and YuMe and Adcolony), and they've seen how they are finding success in dipping into the passive ads so maybe they want to start dipping into our passive apps through Perk.

From a logical standpoint, why would an ad agency buy an app that pays people to view ads, if it were not for the point of showing their ads on the app? That doesn't seem logical here.

Let me just say, that if RhythmOne has a lot of advertisers, we could see that this acquisition will be the best thing yet to happen to passive apps. This just opened the door to a shitload of more adverts. There's a chance that RhythmOne might keep all their ads only on the Perk apps... If this is the case, then holy shit will Perk have that as a major advantage over the competition. Some people commented saying that with this news, Perk will go through some huge changes and insane limitations will prevail while the passiveness will go away. Maybe this is the case. Maybe they don't want Perk to be passive if their ads are going to be showing on it.

As some people pointed out, RhythmOne does not have a very great history of 'following the rules', so there's a chance they won't give a fuck about the apps being passive. Maybe they just want to get views on their ads. It really does look good for an ad company to say 'we get millions of views to your ad campaign quickly'. It could cause impressive growth for them.

In theory, this acquisition could also result in higher payouts. Please pay attention to the word 'could.' Previously, Perk was an intermediate between Us and the ad agencies. Now that an ad agency owns Perk, there's no longer so much of the middleman who's going to try and profit inbetween. If ad agencies paid perk 50% of what they make, and perk pays 10% of what they make, there is a lot of room for bumping up the payouts. Obviously, you need to remember that RhythmOne is here to profit, so we actually probably won't see bumps to the payouts, sadly.

That does bring us to the next part of this post. How will the payouts look in 2017?

Assuming that the quantity of ads available in 2017 will be similar to/better than in 2016 (I personally believe we will see more ads in 2017 than this year), we can expect to earn less. It's the general concept of 'someone will do it for less... so let's pay em less.'. This reminds me of the uber story where uber would pay decently, until they started finding as many uber drivers as they possibly could. Uber would (and actually still is) getting as many drivers to sign up as possible through aggressive marketing (literally paying people to sign up to drive) and referral systems. Once Uber had so many drivers, they realized they didn't need everyone at once, so they cut the pay significantly. You'll find that a lot of the uber drivers left, but a lot of people stayed because they were willing to take less pay. That's exactly what will happen with beermoney apps/sites as well. While I do think that some certain apps almost literally cannot go lower with the payouts, I do believe that some of the apps that currently pay alright might consider lowering their rates. It is a gradual decrease, and we've noticed it happening since May of 2015 (the first instance of nerfing on a passive video app).

This is my take, and I'm really interested in knowing what you think will happen going forward. Again, I want to stress that several of the things I wrote here are predictions, so please don't hate me if they turn out being incorrect.