Running is still a fashionable and cool sport. This sport, cheap par excellence, continues to count on waves of devotees who practice it occasionally or continuously. Every good runner worth his salt, in addition to having complete equipment, has to count the marks. And the most social, share them with your friends or with a community. Smart wristbands or smart bands as well as smartwatches along with numerous apps for running or walking – both paid and free – that measure distance, pace, and other variables are part of the usual equipment.
Pay to walk apps
How much time do you spend running or walking? Two or three hours a week or more? That great dedication is sure to pay off. Can you imagine that they will pay you to do something that you like? Well, that’s what the apps that pay you to walk do. Now there has come a new breed of apps that pay a user to walk! Yes, you read it correctly. Thanks to the fast advancements in mobile app technology we now have apps that let users stay healthy and reward them with discounts and cash etc., for the same. There are many popular mobile apps like Charity Miles, Sweatcoin, and others that encourage users to earn money or get wonderful rewards for every step they take. These apps now have a huge fan following and are very popular even among those who are not health conscious.
The main objective of these apps is to motivate the person and to increase the distance traveled thanks to the economic incentive. The apps do not pretend to be an unattainable challenge for the user and are designed to cater to profiles of people who walk, as well as more professional people who run many kilometers per month. You can check more details about these app in the article by sparkous.com.
Pay to walk spps business model
These apps business models are quite straightforward but vary from app to app. In some apps, users have to pay a nominal monthly fee, regardless of the routine they do. Then, depending on the kilometers they travel, they accumulate money and withdraw it from the system through a Paypal account or any other payment method that is applicable and linked to the account. The money can be withdrawn after a certain amount is accumulated. The amount that is earned depends on the kilometers but also on the level in which the user is.
Some apps also incorporate competition psychology, network effect, along with discounts and referral benefits to keep the users engaged. In such apps, users can compete with each other. This helps it increase the friend circle and acts as a motivator to perform better as well as a method to promote the app.
Some apps also make use of the referral and loyalty program to attract users.
The users of such apps are very varied, from people who happily walk 30 km per week to athletes who run 900 km per month.
How exactly do these apps work?
Most of these pay to walk apps make use of advanced technologies like IoT and motion sensor technology to serve their core purposes. These apps work on GPS tracking, motion sensing, etc., technologies to calculate every step that users make and then reward them as per the user’s data. Most of these apps can be integrated with your smartwatch app that gets installed in a phone and sync data with these apps.
How do these apps make money?
As you can see, almost all these apps are free to download from the Apple Store of Android Store but to sustain and have a growing business, these apps also need to generate revenue. Most of these apps or companies raise money via seed funds. Then there are different plans that a user can purchase based on how much she/he would like to earn. These apps also make money by following the partnership model where it partners with different brands in order to provide discounts, sell merchandise, or other offers. Another way these apps generate revenue is via advertisements. Besides the commission and fees from featuring partner brands, these apps also make money through in-app advertisements. Just like any other application, most of the pay to walk apps has incorporated Google ads in its revenue model as a secondary revenue source.
The future of pay to walk apps
The very prospect of earning while just walking makes these apps an eye candy to the internet savvy users. It’s catchy and is bound to attract attention. Just the novelty of the idea helps such apps to gain quite the traction since they have the potential to be spread via word-of-mouth.
As of now, we have read about everything fancy about such apps. But these apps are also facing issues that they need to address.
Firstly, such apps tend to consume a lot of battery because they continuously track the movement via GPS. Keeping these apps active for long durations will drain the mobile battery. You can imagine the impact that such apps which are meant to run continuously can have on your mobile battery life.
Then there’s the privacy part. We don’t have a clear idea of what these apps plan on doing with the location data that it collects.
These issues that are highlighted here are minor discrepancies and are fixable. Some of the major apps in this area have already catered to these issues while others are still working on the solution.
Enough of the talking now. As you can see that one can make money out of a simple task like walking or running, one just has to dig deeper for methods that are not conventionally used. I hope that this article has provided you with insights about how pay for walk apps work and make money.
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