The independent Getjar market with a catalog of 480 thousand applications has launched its own viral currency for Android devices.
The currency bearing the unambiguous name Getjar Gold can be spent on applications in any Android market, including, in fact, the Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. It is earned through advertising: users receive coins by downloading applications, then they can spend the same coins on paid applications or in-game purchases. Developers, receiving Getjar Gold, in turn, can transfer them to real money.
“The virtual nature of the currency and its link to global advertising costs solve two major problems that the usual billing platforms suffer from: low conversion and lack of access to global markets,” says Ilja Laurs, Executive Director of Getjar. – “The first results show a noticeable increase in both revenue and conversion. We think we should expect a 10-fold increase.”
By the way, at the moment more than 425 thousand developers are registered on Getjar, whose applications have been downloaded more than 2.4 billion times. In 2011, at the World Economic Forum, the company was awarded the award “for innovations in technologies that affect the development of business and society.”