Explanation: What Is Phone Farming?

Attribution: Author’s Own Work

If you’re learning about the GPT world, you’ve certainly come across people talking about their phone farms. But you may not know what they’re talking about. Or perhaps you do, and want to have your own farm, but aren’t sure how to do it. Or maybe you already have a phone farm, but are curious as to why you aren’t earning as much as you used to or think you should be able to. Wherever you are on the spectrum, hopefully you can learn a bit from this blog post.

How it Works

Phone farming uses smartphones (and sometimes tablets) to run money making apps that can run with no (or very little) input from the user. In the vast majority of situations, the phone will be playing videos or apps that run automatically. Depending on the app, users will get points for every video that plays or for running an app for a period of time. Those points can then be used to receive cash or gift cards.

One exception to this rule is the CashMagnet app. You can check out my in-depth review of that app, where I discuss how they do things a bit differently.

How Much Can I Earn?

As I write this, you can’t expect to earn that much from phone farming. A few years ago, you could easily make a few dollars a day, maybe even upward of $10+. But now, that’s pretty much an unrealistic expectation.

Why Isn’t Phone Farming Very Profitable Anymore?

I can’t say with much detail, but my basic understanding of “reward advertising” is that from 2015 – 2016, companies that paid for advertising through GPT passive earning programs were realizing that they were getting ripped off.

Reward advertising pays users to view ads. In the heyday of phone farming, phone farmers were getting rewarded (fairly handsomely, in hindsight) for viewing ads on their phones. But these farmers weren’t watching these ads. And even if they wanted to watch the ads, they would have dozens of phones running at once, so it was impossible for them to view all of the ads that were playing.

At first, the GPT providers didn’t care that they were getting paid to run ads that only a few of their users were actually seeing because they were getting paid no matter what. But when the GPT provider’s advertising partners (advertising companies, publishers and/or supply side partners, I imagine) realized that they might be paying for thousands or millions of ad views that no one was watching, they said enough was enough.

Now, it’s a lot harder to set up a farm where you can start a video set or app, then walk away for a few hours while you make money. There are a few apps where you can still do this (like Yoolotto, EngageMeTV, Rewardable or CheckPoints), but you’re making money very slowly, probably only 5-10 cents per day per device with most users. This still results in a profit even after accounting for the cost of electricity. But if you have buy your setup from scratch, it might take over a year, just to break even. I know some people are having more success than others, possible making 20, 30 or 40 cents per phone per day, but I don’t think most farmers are able to earn this.

One partial exception to this farming slowdown are apps that pay you to download and run games, like FitPlay or AppLike. But the catch is that they’re notorious for not paying out (probably because they know users are starting a game and leaving it alone all night) or not giving credit for running a game app, even if the user is actually playing it.

To put things in perspective, a few years ago, Perk farmers were able to make several dollars per phone per day with impunity. Many of these Perk apps don’t pay anywhere near as much anymore and if they do, they’re nowhere near as passive (AppTrailers is a great example of this and I discussed this app in an earlier blog post).

What the GPT Providers Did in Response

Basically, they made passive earnings from watching ads on phones a lot less profitable or eliminated it altogether. You can still earn a respectable amount of money (like $1 per day) through passive earning on your computer from sites like Swagbucks, EarnHoney and instaGC, but they’re VERY quick to implement a softban, so users have to be judicious on how they take advantage of this passive earning ability.

Today, GPT providers are in alliance with third party verification services that “make sure” the ads are being viewed, or at least farmers aren’t abusing the system like they used to. How this verification process works is a very closely kept secret because if farmers figured out how it worked (such as how many devices can be in use at any one time, using VPNs, making multiple account, daily earning limits, etc.) we’d all be exploiting the system until new verification algorithms were put into place. Now you understand why it’s hard to get a straight answer from GPT providers as to how much money you can maker per day or how many devices are allowed per IP or account.

Remember, if farmers don’t get paid, GPT providers don’t get paid. And the more farmers make, the more GPT providers can make. So they want farming to have, but they have this delicate balance of trying to help farmers make as much money as possible, but making sure their advertising partners don’t get upset with all the farming that goes on. If the GPT providers had their way, they’d encourage users to farm to their hearts’ content. But the GPT providers know that if they condoned farming, it would upset their advertisers and throw up red flags with their third party verification services.

You can still make money by watching ads on phones, but you usually need to interact with it, like press a button every few minutes or X out of a completed ad. Reward Stash is a good example of this. You can make 50 or more cents per day (probably in less than a day) with it, but you have to X out every single ad that plays. But if you’re willing to babysit a Swagbucks or Perk app, Reward Stash isn’t a bad option. But Reward Stash is still not a farming app because it’s not passive, at all.

Another way to phone farm and still make money is to get a hold of farming phones for free. If you can get 3 or 4 farming phones at no cost to you and you make as little as 20 cents per day from all 4 of them, that’s still over $5 per month through passive earning. That’s roughly what you can expect to make from lockscreen GPT apps on a monthly basis, based on my research.

The future of phone farming doesn’t look too bright, but before we get all doomy and gloomy, keep in mind that as badly as you want to make money for as little work as possible, so do the GPT providers. Even though advertisers are pulling out of farming apps, they still need to find a way to spend their advertising money, so it’s going to go somewhere. For example, for you Swagbucks users out there, you might have noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of surveys available. Think this increase in survey opportunities as your ability to watch NCraves and other Swagbucks videos decreases is a coincidence?

Then there is CashMagnet, which is intentionally designed for passive earning and farming. Maybe it won’t last, but it’s reassuring that there are GPT providers out there looking for passive earning potential.