Pool is actually well leveraged towards an advertising model, in that the whole purpose of it is to ultimately promote businesses, both by providing incentives for customers to find new businesses and by encouraging increased spending. As a transaction marketplace dedicated to helping people leverage and make the most out of their loyalty rewards points, it’s difficult to convince users of this function if we contain a transaction fee. On the other hand, point systems seem like advertising themselves, and so a model where companies can, say, promote their points to the top of a point aggregate, should not look too out of the blue. In fact, we are playing around with the idea that businesses may have to pay to even be included within a point system, in return for transaction tooling and a spot on the app.
That being said, this may require more tracking and surveillance than usual. User trust is critical in an app that deals with your financials, and providing targeted ads may quickly break this trust. With points, users want an easy, frictionless, simple system that is objective for all points, and ads not only complicate an already-difficult to consolidate UI, but harm the purpose of democratizing points .
