bijan:

We have a number of startups in our portfolio that build iOS and Android apps.

To my knowledge, none of them pay for traffic to their apps.

But they constantly get pitched by different 3rd parties with the promise of better exposure and distribution in the app store.

Some offer to buy low cost…

Rafer sez:
@bijansabet The world is messier than what you describe, particularly once institutional capital is deployed. Some companies buy traffic to save time in ways you should probably encourage. Traffic is often bought for testing (AB, et al) testing purposes or to kick off viral loops. And once one has an ad/viral loop with a positive marginal cash flow, shouldn’t you encourage them to buy buy buy as long as long as the return on cash exceeds some appropriate hurdle rate?