Little Tiny Ads

You may remember the money-making scheme that was being sold by some wise-guy many years ago–tiny little ads. His concept was that you placed hundreds or thousands of little tiny ads in newspapers (hey, it was the old days!), advertising anything. The premise was that given the large number of ads, even if you were selling baseball rosters or chicken recipes, you’d make some amount of money. You know, 1% to 2% of a thousand is still 10-20 sales. Well, now it’s hit the App Store–and Apple has cut them off. The company Perfect Acumen operated by Khalid Shaikh was using 26 programmers to pump out five apps a day, or a total of 943 appss over nine months. Most of them were so-called “serialized” apps, meaning they shared the same basic structure, but pulled in different photos, news or other info. Well, Apple received complaints that the apps violated copyright agreements, and has pulled their developer license. At 99¢ each, Shaikh was probably making a ton of money. If he sold 100 copies of each app, he’d be making over $92,000. Just shows you, old schemes apparently still work.