Every app wants to be like Snapchat: it came out of nowhere, without much planning, and now devours attention spans across North America. It's also worth $800 million, mostly through word of mouth. Most companies can't copy this, but they'll sure lie about it.

In a recent TechCrunch writeup, the marketing director of Glide—some video messaging app—bragged “thank god we haven’t had to spend too much on [user] acquisition – all of our growth is organic and viral." Just like Path, right?

All of our growth is organic and viral. Those are both buzzwords, but they're supposed to mean that Glide hasn't paid to promote itself. It's just so great that people are downloading it and spreading the word, evangelizing on their own. It was enough for TechCrunch to headline the post "Video Texting App Glide Is Going Viral, Now Ranked Just Ahead Of Instagram In App Store."

But Glide is lying! TechCrunch might've known this if it spent a couple of minutes on Bing: Glide pays a company called Nanigans to put ads in your Facebook feed. It's paying them as much as $50,000 a month to advertise to you on Facebook, we hear. They're not even lying very well: Glide is cited as one of Nanigans' clients:

The only thing worse than seeing moronic ads for gimmick apps across Facebook like syphilis chancres is knowing that the people behind those ads are gloating about being too good for ads. No one is too good for ads. But no one will cop to deliberate marketing, because there's nothing disruptive about honest hucksterism.

Glide didn't reply to an email asking about any of this.