“Apple just sent an email to members of the App Store affiliate program saying that App Store commissions will be reduced from 7 percent to 2.5 percent on May 1st — that’s a 64 percent cut,” Romain Dillet reports for TechCrunch. “While this change will have no effect on App Store users, it has some implications on the App Store ecosystem.”
“Many websites from the Apple community link to App Store downloads with a unique referral ID in the link,” Dillet reports. “When customers buy apps or in-app purchases using this link, Apple gives back a small cut to its affiliate partner.”
“If Apple drastically cuts this revenue stream, the company could end up alienating people writing for those sites,” Dillet reports. “But it could also indicate that some bigger App Store changes are coming soon.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Could have some major implications for App review sites, if they’ve put all or many of their eggs in Apple’s basket – especially give Apple’s oh-so-genous single week of notice.
However, after the great Apple Store affiliate purge and then the slow motion iAd train wreck, we doubt anyone with any experience or knowledge of history whatsoever would trust any Apple affiliate program as a reliable revenue source.
More. Consolidation of keeping more of what you ha and milking it rathe than generate new streams. Sounds like Microsoft in the 90s.
Just one more example of the bean counters being in charge.
Screw spending money (IR&D) to make current product lines significantly better.
Screw spending money (IR&D) to develop new product lines.
Screw spending money to make service and support better.
Squeeze the marketing and supply chains for every penny you can get. That’s the ticket!!!!
I think Timmy secretly admired Steve Ballmer.
I hate to say it, but you could be right.
Totally unimaginative, tightwadish, and traditional. I smell Ahrend’s pu••y juices all over this.
I don’t know the dollar and cents calculations but affiliate sites seems like a good way of marketing, lots of sites (blogs etc) writing about Apple and linking back to the store. Isn’t a few percent more worth this? All these sites mostly working for peanuts promoting Apple.
Consider Apple spends over $1 billion a year directly in marketing (Samsung about 10 times this number) this cut seems like manager Bean Counter vs Entrepreneur Sales thinking…
Tim Cook, making enemies out of friends. There isn’t anything this guy couldn’t f@ck up. This seems a sign of Apple desperation.
There could be more to this story than is superficially visible at the moment. If Apple were planning on reducing it’s 30% cut from apps sold on the App Store, then it would need to also reduce the commission paid to these people. I wonder if Apple is simply warning referrers that their business model will be affected in the near future as a consequence of a more significant change?
I would prefer to wait for a while and see what Apple actually ends up doing before jumping to conclusions. If the end result were that a higher percentage of the fee went to developers, I think most of us would be happy about that and it could be a very welcome boost to the app development industry.
Wait and see what happens before passing judgment?! How old-fashioned (and refreshing)!
This on the heels of Amazon’s slashing of affiliate payouts. I could sooner see Apple slashing developer payouts too rather than increasing them, like what self-published authors are facing. https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/04/14/writers-take-heed-a-sea-change-is-under-way/