No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points.
But they also fiddled with things on the other end.
At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her."
I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless.
I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I was just doing it passively on one computer without extensions.
Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.