"I looked at the entire attention economy and asked: what if we just… dropped the pretence?"
Ad Simulator is a website where users watch advertisements and receive credits. I want to be extraordinarily clear about what those credits are, because I am proud of this and I want you to understand it fully: they are fake internet points. They cannot be spent. They cannot be redeemed. They do not unlock features, confer status, purchase goods, or entitle the holder to anything on this earth. A credit is a number. The number goes up. That is not a simplified explanation — that is the complete and exhaustive description of what a credit is and does.
Users watch the ads anyway. I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think about it often, usually while smiling. The business model is as follows: brands pay me to show their ads. Users watch those ads. Users receive numbers that mean nothing. I keep the money. This is not a hidden arrangement. You are reading it right now. The platform makes no promises, offers no rewards, and conceals nothing. It simply shows you an ad, increments a counter, and invites you to do it again. The remarkable part — the part that I consider my genuine contribution to human civilisation — is that this works.
It works because I asked a question nobody else had the audacity to ask: what if the pretence wasn't necessary? Every other ad-supported platform gives you something — a social feed, a video stream, a search result — and hides the ads inside it. I removed the thing they were hiding the ads inside. What remains is just the ads, some numbers, and a wheel that spins. People use it. Every day. On purpose. I consider this the funniest and most profitable thing I have ever done.
"Credits cannot be spent. Credits cannot be redeemed. Credits are a number that goes up. That's it. That's the product." — The Founder, in response to the question "but what do the credits do?"
A user signs in and is presented with a single large button labelled RUN AD. They press it. A wheel spins — dramatically, with sound effects — to reveal the rarity of the incoming ad. The ad plays. They receive one credit. The credit is worth nothing. This cycle repeats for as long as the user chooses, which is often longer than you would expect from a platform that has just told them they are receiving nothing.
The loop is not novel. Press button, receive reward, number goes up — this is the same mechanism behind likes, streaks, follower counts, achievement badges, daily login bonuses, and every Battle Pass ever sold. You have already spent years of your life chasing metrics that meant nothing, on platforms owned by people who got very rich from your engagement. Twitter didn't pay you for your tweets. Instagram didn't pay you for your photos. Duolingo doesn't pay you for your streak. None of them ever pretended they would. Neither do I. The difference is that I'm saying it directly, on the About page, in plain language, and you're still going to press the button. I find this clarifying.
I did not invent any of the psychology involved. I just noticed it was lying around unmonetised.
Each ad watch triggers a rarity roll. Six tiers. I will tell you exactly what this system is, without euphemism: it is operant conditioning dressed up in nice colours and a spinning wheel. Variable ratio reinforcement. The mechanism is identical to slot machines, loot boxes, and Pokémon card packs. You do not know what you will get. It might be Common. It might — astronomically unlikely, but possible — be Mythic. The uncertainty is the point. The uncertainty is why you press the button again. I did not invent this. I simply pointed it at an ad network.
The rarity system is operant conditioning. I put it in writing because nobody reads the About page. And because, as I have discovered, knowing it is a slot machine does not stop slot machines from working. That is either a damning indictment of the human condition or proof that I have built something very clever. I prefer the latter interpretation. It pays better.
When a user lands a new rarity, the screen fills with sparkles, colour, and fanfare calibrated to the tier. A Mythic reveal is, in my own considered opinion, aggressively joyful. The user has received nothing of value. They have been shown an advertisement and awarded a number. They feel, nonetheless, like they won something. This gap — between what happened and what the user experienced — is the entire product. It is the most elegant thing I have ever built, and it costs me approximately nothing to operate.
Every ad a user watches is catalogued in their personal collection. Duplicates are tracked with quantity badges. Users can scroll through their library, rewatch ads, and observe how many times they have watched a particular advertisement in exchange for credits that cannot be used for anything. They are curating, with evident care, a personal archive of promotional content. I have made this feel meaningful. It is not meaningful. It is a list of ads. Multiple users have called it "satisfying." This is my proudest professional achievement.
A global leaderboard ranks users by total credits earned, unique ads collected, and rarest pulls. Right now, somewhere, a real human being is pressing a button so that their position on this leaderboard improves. Their rank confers no prize, no privilege, and no reward of any kind. They are competing — with full knowledge of this — for the right to have a larger meaningless number next to their name than another person's meaningless number. I built this leaderboard in an afternoon. I did not expect it to work as well as it does. The internet, again, had already done the preparation. I just showed up.
Advertisers place video ads into the pool, assigned to a rarity tier of their choosing. A Legendary or Mythic ad reaches only the users who have watched enough ads to roll those tiers — meaning the audience has, by revealed preference, demonstrated a genuine willingness to watch advertisements for no tangible benefit whatsoever. This is the highest quality engagement signal an advertiser can purchase. These users are not here by accident. They pressed a button that said RUN AD. They knew what it did. They pressed it again.
Every impression is recorded. Every credit awarded is logged. I know, with precision, how many times each ad has been watched, by how many users, through which rarity tier, and for how long. I have built a highly instrumented machine for converting human attention into revenue, powered entirely by fake internet points that I produce at zero marginal cost. The users know this. I told them. They used the platform anyway, and then they told their friends.
"You already do this for free on every other app. Here, at least one of us is getting paid." — The Founder, in his keynote at a conference he sponsored so that he could give a keynote
The advertising industry's central problem is that people hate ads. They install blockers. They skip. They leave the room. Decades of effort have produced increasingly aggressive formats that have made audiences angrier and more determined to avoid them. I solved this not by making ads less intrusive, but by making the act of watching ads the entire reason to open the app. You are not tolerating ads to access something else. You came here for the ads. Because the next one might be Mythic. Because your number might go up. Because someone on the leaderboard is gaining on you.
This works because the modern internet spent twenty years conditioning people to derive satisfaction from accumulating metrics. Follower counts. Like tallies. Achievement points. Completion percentages. Streak counters. Login bonuses. Battle pass levels. The psychological infrastructure required to make a person press a button for a fake number is already fully installed in the average user, pre-built, pre-tested, and ready to operate. I did not build that infrastructure. I simply connected it to an ad network and collected the output.
The credits cost me nothing to produce. This bears repeating: they are not backed by any asset, promise, or redemption mechanism. They are integers in a database. The marginal cost of issuing one credit is zero. The marginal revenue of showing the ad that earns that credit is not zero. This arithmetic is the foundation on which Ad Simulator is built, and I am extremely comfortable with it.
They're free. They're worthless. There's a Mythic tier. You won't be able to help yourself.
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