"It's a trap!" -you should know. Some of us have fallen for the ways of the advertiser, yet some of us have evaded the capture of the predator, is there anything different between the free and the caught? Well there may be, but one thing is for sure, the trap is still catching people today. So what is this trap? Well advirtisements go up to save you money one way or another, "do ___ and get $10 off ____." Most often I see it assosiated with Instagram followers, free Clash of Clans gems, or iTunes money. Now, for the main event. How does one redeem this free money? Well it's simple, type in your username, download a few apps, and then get money. Yet always somewhere along the way it happens to not work. It may just be me(sarcasm) but it always happens to get stuck between downloading apps and getting money. You may not get the win this round, but the company does. Each time a person falls the company gets another download for their app.
The Science behind the madness
Why does this work, who could possibly fall for this? It can be along the lines of a lovemark but more often it's closer to what's formally known as: attention. We all want attention to a certain extent, some of us want 2.7M followers on Instagram so we say Bless up, another one, and they don't want us to.... So we will, every other sentence. Yet some of us would rather have a few followers who we actually know. And still, there is no difference. If you're hit where it matters, then anything will work. Using the addictive nature of attention an advirtisement can make a false promise of a completely unrelated idea and get someone to sign up for something. After one signs up, somehow an error occurs with loading the page, yet the newsletter that the person signed up for weekly still comes. Barriers that were once set can, and will be broken if enough is out on the line. The science is deciding on each ad: What's enough? Once enough is found, all you have to do is tell the user to share a link then the product will appear. The "dummies" spread the product so the ads don't have to.
How to Avoid it
It's quite a simple theory really. There are two ways to avoid the perpetual attack of falsified promises, the ideal would be to do both. Option one, the simplest of all: ignore any thing that says "free ___." In the world we live in, nothing but air is free(for now). Option two: don't get too connected to things. As the great philosophers often think, connection to objects can not be permanent. An Instagram page is not worth $30 and a few apps for 1k unknown people to start following you.
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