They'd be MPs.
The other thing which I recently learned about (nothing to do with MP's)....do you remember a couple of years ago, when there was a 'Pokemon Go' craze, where kids , and adults alike, downloaded an app on their phone and chased augmented reality Pokemon characters ?
That turned out to be a marketing exercise, where business owners could purchase 'lures' from the Pokemon game which would appear in their premises, to encourage 'footfall' to their establishment. A business owner paid $0.99 for each lure, and a survey showed that 60% of players hung around at that business because of the lure (which has a lifetime of 30 minutes), hoping a game character would show up. The average spend of the players in the business was around $11. Great for business !
It's a free game now, and,Just like before, it's free because you're the product. It wasn't free at the start though.... It was developed by Niantic, a Google company, with a third of costs and revenues attributed to Nintendo.
By 2016 it had made Niantic $740 million, and had boosted Nintendo's share price by a similar amount, It made about $1.6 million per day on the app store (averaged)
All that came at relatively low cost, Nintendo took their licence fee, Google already had the maps and Streetview data, they only needed to develop the mobile app for the phones, which, is very cheap because lots of young programmers believe that phone apps are the way to a fast buck and so they work for virtually nothing !
In the end, people get a bit wise and fads like that fall by the wayside, but what comes next ?
Edited by fixitsan, 24 February 2021 - 08:45 am.