For those who were unaware this market existed: if you hypothetically distributed a downloadable application, you'd be bored to tears of sales reps (or spambots

For those who were unaware this market existed: if you hypothetically distributed a downloadable application, you'd be bored to tears of sales reps (or spambots) from Pay Per Install advertising companies attempting to sign you up for their platform. The going rate was about $1 a download (n.b. that figure is very outdated -- probably less these days). This is -- again, not talking about the YC company here -- for encouraging customers to either change their search engine provider to one who pays the PPI network, install a toolbar in their browser or desktop which either shows ads or gets searches (more commonly), or just going ahead and rooting the user. I'll confess that I haven't always been a model of politeness when responding to these sales pitches. This is one of the many, many avenues on the Internet advertising chain by which billions of dollars is transferred between large, publicly well-regarded companies and six layers of intermediaries and... folks who the large, well-regarded companies would never, ever, ever do business with.