Apple Removes Apps From iTunes Affiliate Program

Used to hit Toucharcade when I was looking for any game iOS-related. That was when Real Racing was still independent, cool 99¢ games like Fastar!, Shift:, Edge and even the first couple of Angry Birds games were still being released and Wednesday night / Thursday morning was a great day because all the new games of the week became available.

Then everything went free2play with consumable IAP and I started backing away from iOS gaming. Still play the occasional game of XCOM:Enemy Within, KOTOR or a couple of the better tower defense games (Anomaly, Kingdom Rush, Tower Madness 2, Defender Chronicles, Sentinel 3 & 4), but I have zero interest in new games because they all seem to be about attaching a vacuum cleaner to your wallet.
 
I'm torn on this decision.

On the one hand it obviously does hurt quality sites like TA. These sites have built themselves around the business model of reviewing apps and taking a cut of the sales that those reviews generate.

However, there is a bit of a conflict of interest and bias involved in these review sites. The goal of the review is always going to be to sell the app (or at least some of the apps they review) in the end. This leads to the question of do I review only high quality apps and therefore sell more apps or do I provide examples of apps that are crap to warn people not to buy which will cost time/money, but generate much less revenue for the site.

TA tends to only review high quality apps and they rarely (if ever) review anything lower than 3 stars. This basically means anyone who's wondering about the quality of an app that is truly terrible would not find this on TA. It also makes their rating system more like a 3 star system where you have: Average(3 stars), Good(4 stars), and Excellent(5 stars) apps, but nothing on the very low end.

Spammy sites will also tend to have a 3-5 star rating system, but that's more of a random number generator and their reviews mean almost nothing other than they grabbed a few screen shots and talked about the general game play. These sites will die as a result of this change and that is a good thing in my book!

TL;DR - Spammy sites go away and quality sites like TA can focus on providing even higher quality reviews without any impact from bias due to trying/needing to get "the click".
 
OldSchoolMacGuy said:
The developer fee of 30% is awesome for developers. You should see how much they pay a normal retailer or someone like Amazon. 30% is a steal.

What Apple gives you with their platform is well worth the money. The ability to get in front of millions of people for just a small cut? Done deal. Being in the App Store has the ability to get you exposure you'd never get on your own website in a million years. There's a reason most developers are cool with it (it's generally the crummy little ones that would never be seen anyways that complain).
Click to expand...

Completely false comparison.

#1 - A physical product involves far more logistics. It actually costs a meaningful amount for a physical retailer to exist. That's why Amazon can crush them - Amazon doesn't have to pay anywhere near as much to maintain their infrastructure. As low as Amazon's costs are, Apple is well below them - Amazon still has a lot of logistics to deal with, given they're still selling physical products, even if customers need not see them on a shelf. Apple is literally doing nothing. They injest data provided by the person who wants to sell the product, and they distribute it to customers. Ask MacRumors how much they're paying to maintain these forums. The forums are likely more expensive to maintain than the app store.
#2 - A physical product can be sold from any retailer I can convince to sell it. Or I can sell it directly to customers and bypass the retailers, if I feel I can market it better. My iOS app? I can sell it through Apple, or I can not sell it at all.

Other places to look at for comparison instead of the MacRumors forums - how about ROM sites? Same thing. They're receiving executable code and distributing it. On nothing more than ad revenue.
 
Phogro said:
I'm torn on this decision.

On the one hand it obviously does hurt quality sites like TA. These sites have built themselves around the business model of reviewing apps and taking a cut of the sales that those reviews generate.

However, there is a bit of a conflict of interest and bias involved in these review sites. The goal of the review is always going to be to sell the app (or at least some of the apps they review) in the end. This leads to the question of do I review only high quality apps and therefore sell more apps or do I provide examples of apps that are crap to warn people not to buy which will cost time/money, but generate much less revenue for the site.

TA tends to only review high quality apps and they rarely (if ever) review anything lower than 3 stars. This basically means anyone who's wondering about the quality of an app that is truly terrible would not find this on TA. It also makes their rating system more like a 3 star system where you have: Average(3 stars), Good(4 stars), and Excellent(5 stars) apps, but nothing on the very low end.

Spammy sites will also tend to have a 3-5 star rating system, but that's more of a random number generator and their reviews mean almost nothing other than they grabbed a few screen shots and talked about the general game play. These sites will die as a result of this change and that is a good thing in my book!

TL;DR - Spammy sites go away and quality sites like TA can focus on providing even higher quality reviews without any impact from bias due to trying/needing to get "the click".
Click to expand...

That's all fine and good, but if a site like TouchArcade can't sustain themselves without that consistent 7% revenue stream (that's been baked into their business model for 10 years), there will no employees left to review anything.
 
If there is a chance Tim can have a couple of cents extra and not you, he’ll make that decision happen.

He’s on the bread line don’t you know.
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
Completely false comparison.

#1 - A physical product involves far more logistics. It actually costs a meaningful amount for a physical retailer to exist. That's why Amazon can crush them - Amazon doesn't have to pay anywhere near as much to maintain their infrastructure. As low as Amazon's costs are, Apple is well below them - Amazon still has a lot of logistics to deal with, given they're still selling physical products, even if customers need not see them on a shelf. Apple is literally doing nothing. They injest data provided by the person who wants to sell the product, and they distribute it to customers. Ask MacRumors how much they're paying to maintain these forums. The forums are likely more expensive to maintain than the app store.
#2 - A physical product can be sold from any retailer I can convince to sell it. Or I can sell it directly to customers and bypass the retailers, if I feel I can market it better. My iOS app? I can sell it through Apple, or I can not sell it at all.

Other places to look at for comparison instead of the MacRumors forums - how about ROM sites? Same thing. They're receiving executable code and distributing it. On nothing more than ad revenue.
Click to expand...

Software is a high margin business. You make something once and resell it again and again at virtually no added cost. It's the same to sell 1 copy or 1,000,000 copies. Because of that, developers can afford greater discounts in return for higher sales from places like the App Store.

And you're kidding yourself if you believe that the MacRumors forums see more traffic in a day than the App Store. Absolutely delusional. The App Store sees over 2.6 BILLION downloads every month. MacRumors likely hasn't even had a billion visitors in the entire time it's been around.

It's obviously not even worth debating this with you. Clearly you don't work in software nor understand the costs of doing business in the software world. Have a great day.
 
psac said:
That's all fine and good, but if a site like TouchArcade can't sustain themselves without that consistent 7% revenue stream (that's been baked into their business model for 10 years), there will no employees left to review anything.
Click to expand...

True. The key is the "IF" in that equation. The way I see it there are three options.

1.) TA continues forward by either reducing costs or finding alternative revenue streams
2.) A new company comes along with an innovative way to monentize appreview/aggregation
3.) There are no long any third party review sites (which I think is highly unlikely as there's clearly a demand for this sort of thing).

This is a great example of how a business can really put themselves in trouble if they rely too heavily on one revenue stream especially when that revenue stream is not entirely in their control.
 
there was an affiliated link to begin with? so all those websites promoting / suggesting the exact same top apps for photography / productivity etc etc were all using affiliated links? dammit, i have given those scumbags extra clicks that i should not have in the first place.
 
While it is very nice that Apple have widened the scope of their curation on the App Store and show a more varied selection, discovery is weaker beyond that. The given reason does not appear to bear out.

Sites such as Touch Arcade are a benefit to the iOS ecosystem, almost certainly of much greater value than the cost of the affiliate program.

Just the fact that people are earning from it means it has value as it shows people are using those links to find apps. Unless the figures show that the money distributed is so negligible that the cost of running the program is far higher, but I doubt that.
 
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