Locket Puts Ads On Your Lockscreen, Pays You For It

Advertising is slowly working its way into every nook and cranny of our lives. Soon, you won’t be able to buy toilet paper without having a dancing Charmin bear appear every time you use the product and suggest Tucks pads. So, if our future is to be harassed by sphincter-obsessed animals and other forms of advertising, we might as well at least get paid for it. Enter Locket.

Locket is pretty simple: You download the app, which is for Android since Apple can’t bear to allow anybody making money off their platform but them. And then just use it for your lockscreen. It puts up an ad instead of whatever Allison Brie GIF you made your lock, but the trade-off is, you get paid for it, whether you choose to learn more about the product or boot the ad so you can read your text message.

You don’t get paid much, of course. You get a penny per swipe, and you’re limited to three pennies per hour. Roughly speaking, if you swiped three times an hour, every hour, every day, for a year, you’d make… $262.80 a year. Presumably Locket gets more than that for selling those ads in the first place.

On the other hand, if advertising is only going to get more intense, we might as well get something out of it. Hey, we post personal data to Facebook for free, we might as well have our phones pay us something.

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