Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What to Do | Hacker News Reader

Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What to Do

toucharcade.com

59 pointsminimaxir7 comments

Affiliate programs are sometimes yanked out of the hands of people making big money on a individual basis. I read about a fellow that was making something like $100K per month from the amazon affiliate program and then one day without cause or reason it was revoked on that guy. Imagine having an insane lifestyle like that and then suddenly losing it.

There really isn't anything you can do to make your old business model work. Maybe you can sell your website.

It can be dangerous to rely on a 500 lb gorilla.

I would guess if they started linking to some other website instead of Amazon, they can get at least a healthy fraction of that amount.

The trick is finding a good affilate program or diversifying programs if it is allowed. I'm thinking of setting up an affiliate account with hosting providers with software I am working on. I have found that there are a lot of affiliate programs from a lot of different hosting providers. Problem with apps is there aren't very many stores. I make some money from Apple as an app developer but I don't expect that income to last for ever or even from month to month. It could vanish at any time and I got no recourse for it.

Seems especially problematic if the entire premise of your site is iOS games. It's not like there are many different stores selling iOS games...

I found affiliates to be a complete pain in the backside, they will do almost anything to insert themselves into the transaction including offering cracked versions of my software. I can understand why Apple wants to kill its program.

Meh. Apple is known to milk every possible penny from its customers and companies that develop open their platform as well.

I know this doesn't help, but: this is what you get if you decide to depend on Apple.

Stop referring sales leads to Apple. They need to understand that you are sending them sales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com