Easy money or How not to get followers

It was a long time ago. It was a time when every other article on the internet was about getting easy money, or at least it was just my filter bubble. I didn't have any skills besides playing tennis, though an idea of even insignificant online income seemed attractive.

So I've found a way. My work was to subscribe to other communities in VK* via a special platform. Every subscription gave me a couple of cents. At the end of the week, I had around 1k communities in my subscriptions and some dollars that I exchanged for a VK's internal currency and happily spent on online poker. I felt contended. Soon, I've cleaned up my community list.

I was wondering why did they pay me for such easy tasks. I've realized their business model not so long ago when I got interested in marketing. The platform I was using applied the CPA (cost per action) model.

Advertisers want to get more subscribers for their communities. They pay 0.2$ dollars for a subscriber to this service. Service offers you 0.02$ for a single subscription and earns 0.18$**. Advertisers get their subscribers, you and service earn money. Win-Win-Win.

Not so fast. Remember, I said that I'd cleaned up all my subscriptions after the experiment? Here's the catch. Advertisers get a disloyal and non-target audience.

Do you need these people as an advertiser?
Maybe, if your channel targets the general public (memes, news, funny cats&dogs). Probably, many people will stay with you if you have decent content. If your channel is domain-specific, every other subscriber coming from such a platform will unsubscribe ASAP as they get money or hide your posts from the feed because he/she most likely doesn't give a damn about you and your topic.

So, the conclusion is to make people subscribe to you because they are interested in you and the content you produce, not the money you offer them to subscribe.

You'll ask me how it's connected to programming. I've prepared two points for this case:
1. Every developer should be a bit of a marketer to sell his ideas, solutions, projects, and himself/herself***. So from now on, you may see posts about marketing on this channel.
2. I've considered this info interesting and worth writing about.

*Russian analogy for Facebook
**Numbers may vary
***During the job interview or working as a freelancer

#marketing #thoughts