Apple to Reduce Affiliate Program Commission Rate to 2.5% for Apps Next Week [Updated]

[cfc]

What this MacRumors post doesn't speculate on and Apple's email declines to provide is a reason for this reduction.

My speculation for the reason is simple - Apple is going to reduce the commission percentage they take from apps sales from 30% to about 10%. They'll probably announce this during WWDC.

Even if they reduce it to 0% then small developers such as myself will probably still be worse off. There isn't enough room on the AppStore front page to promote even a fraction of the decent apps out there, so we rely on mentions on third party websites and blogs. This reduction will mean there is far less incentive for such websites to mention apps, which will mean far fewer sales.

 

[Carnegie]

What this MacRumors post doesn't speculate on and Apple's email declines to provide is a reason for this reduction.

My speculation for the reason is simple - Apple is going to reduce the commission percentage they take from apps sales from 30% to about 10%. They'll probably announce this during WWDC.

I think that's extremely unlikely.

For one thing, Apple would be giving away billions per year in earnings. What would be the reason strong enough to justify doing that? Developers are, it seems, already sufficiently incentivized to develop for the iOS platform.

For another, it would be really difficult for Apple to reach its goal of doubling the size of its Services business in the next 4 years if it slashed its App Store revenue in that way. App Store revenue represents a large piece of Apple's Services revenue, and it's an area of strong growth.

 

[ignatius345]

AppShopper has been a very good service (in the past, at least, I haven't paid much attention lately), with a variety of uses. One of the key ones for me was, I had marked "I own/have this" on a bunch of apps, and was subscribed to the RSS feed for updates to things I'd marked... you know that situation where you find an app that's almost what you want, but it's got a glaring deficiency or bug, so you take it off your phone? Oftentimes, a few months later, AppShopper would pop up with news of an update to said app, showing that the bug/deficiency was fixed, leading me to go back to try that app again. There was no other good central way to track such things. It has had other uses as well - a lot of people would throw apps that seemed kind of interesting on their wishlist, then buy them if/when they were informed that the price had dropped.

AppShopper and TouchArcade are part of the same company as MacRumors, as well, if I understand correctly, which is part of the reason why MacRumors has always listed their links in stories (next to a direct link to iTunes). Ah, I just noticed that the "Links" section at the bottom of every MacRumors page has gone from listing recent items from TouchArcade & AppShopper to listing recent items from TouchArcade and the YouTube MacRumors channel, as of sometime very recent - a reasonable change, since the "news" section at AppShopper was never kept up, it was still reporting on the "new iPhone 6s" just recently (I kept meaning to suggest to them that they change it to show the new apps feed from AppShopper instead of the news feed).

Some good points here! Thanks for the clarification.