If you’re willing to have your smartphone location tracked for research data, Placed wants to give you free airline frequent flyer miles.
The Seattle startup today unveiled Frequent Flyer, its newest app that pays people up to 100 airline miles a month in exchange for location data.
Placed tracks smartphone location information from more than two billion data points every day from those that opt-in to share their whereabouts, which can be invaluable for some marketers.
The company’s new app is simple, asking users to enter in basic information and approval to share location data in the phone’s background as the user moves around. The app will also sometimes send surveys to users about the places they’ve visited — once completed, users can earn even more airline miles.
The app shows three participating airlines: Alaska, United, and Hawaiian.
Placed is buying the miles directly from the airlines, and transferring them to its users in exchange for allowing the company to measure their location data.
This is the third reward-based app from Placed, which also has Give2Charity and Panel App. They are somewhat similar to other platforms like Spare5, which utilize smartphones to let people make money/earn rewards without too much labor.
Placed operates three core services: Placed Insights, Placed Attribution, and Placed Targeting. Its data helps generate insight into where people are moving around in the physical world — recent reports showed where Pokemon Go players were hanging out at most frequently, for example.
Founded in 2011, Placed has raised $13.4 million to date from firms like Two Sigma Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and IPG Mediabrands. It employs 85 people.
