The Evolution of the App Store and the App Business
denzhadanov.com
denzhadanov.com
That matches my experience, after my first product I thought I knew enough to avoid the mistakes and it would be easy the next time. It turns out it's hard to know what will succeed and what will fail.
In our first year we've found many of the same learnings as this article and have written about our experiences; https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...
We believe that subscriptions - although currently going through an adjustment and acceptance period - are the future for apps that provide ongoing value.
For apps that don't provide ongoing value, then yes, it may be difficult to survive & one-off payments are probably the only feasible revenue model in those cases.
People would spam and make junk content by the ton in order to catch some of that sweet web traffic money. Your eyeballs would be even more precious to the black hat SEOs.
Its simple aggregation - a payment of 5c to a Youtuber would be swallowed up by credit card fees. But aggregated with millions of other people and done monthly (against a $10/m subscription for the end user, where they get a certain number of credits to use), and it becomes a much larger transaction where the fees become negligible.
New chromium-based but privacy-focused browser, also called Brave. You pledge a certain amount per month (this is opt-in). The time spent by all Brave users determines how much of that pool of cash is distributed to all of the sites that they visit.
See https://brave.com/ -- they have just released their beta and it's pretty amazing. Payments in the new beta are not yet live though.
Also in general the masses probably will never see why to pay 10 bucks or whatever for quality content as they are happy being served the other stuff... i mean, ads wouldn’t be so successful if there weren’t people viewing the crap content they are placed in... even less being clicked on.
But there are thousands of people even responding to spam mails and sending money to some Nigerian Kings...
Wait. How about paying quality content from these. I mean, just telling them your brother has a million in the bank and they just need to pay 1000 to get it out and be rewarded with 10% etc... instead of nothing as usual, they get quality content! Ok after reading too much of that they won’t do it anymore. Selfdestructing Business.
We do not live in such a world.
Without some form of counter-balance they will continue to erode what is previously acceptable behaviour re individual rights. Adblockers provide some of that counter-balance.
The other dirty secret of the largest 'free' adblocker services (other than some purely open-source options) is that many of them are funded via kickbacks from Google. Google pays such services to allow their ads to continue to be displayed. When users pay for a service it is clearer what the incentives are for the service's behaviour.
Fixed that for you!
There's an easy way to fix that. Setup an ethical Ad company that serves ads without malware and responsible advertising.
But how to do that on a scalable and profitable manner is something else.
The issue is those ethical ad networks don’t pay as much as the others because they actually screen their ads and a lot of the garbage ads (that keep the entire advertising industry afloat) wouldn’t make it past review.
As a result, rags like the Daily Mail and a lot of other major news sites simply wouldn’t be able to stay afloat (which frankly would not be a big loss - if your business can’t make money legitimately - without bad ads that is - then maybe it’s time to close down or rethink your business model?).
It’s the content providers that need to find ways to get paid for content and the users who need to understand that content needs someone to create it and these people need to make a living. That being said, a lot of content out there is low quality abd even written fir nothing but attracting search engines - creating traffic and views which get paid by advertisers. So there is a psrt of content and providers nobody will want to pay for and nobody will be missing if it’s gone. The people creating that stuff need to find a way to make a living off something that actually somebody wants and needs...
The real question is - how do you precisely quantify what value your app provides ?
> For apps that don't provide ongoing value, then yes, it may be difficult to survive & one-off payments are probably the only feasible revenue model in those cases.
How about the third option, which has proven to be very successful in the past - one-time payment and payments for larger upgrades. This leaves control in the hands of the user, keeps the old software actually running longer and incentivises developers to actually keep bringing value to the customers. While still giving them steady stream of income.
Of course, you'll first have to kindly beg Tim Cook to allow you to use this business model on Apple hardware.
What stops developers from using this model? There are already free apps which requre SaaS subscriptions. Amazon Kindle famously requires books to be purchased via website, then downloaded in their app.
Now proprietary firms understand that they can't continue evolve commercial software, it's a dead end, so they found a way to lock-in FOSS leaving it inside proprietary environment.