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Comment by adonese | Hacker News Reader

This actually reminds me of Tim Sweeney's tweets regarding stores policies[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/101985252700794470...

App Store Ads are genuinely awful. I have yet to find any that have been anything but spam apps or companies buying their competitor's keywords. They quite definitely make the App Store worse.

I'm guessing that for the app store team everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center. The company makes money from it but it's not tied back to the app store team or not tied back directly enough. Ad revenue however is tied back directly. So they optimize the KPI they are measured on.

> everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center

Really?

Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales...

My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)

I said app store team not Apple overall. To Apple its revenue, to the team running the store app its a cost center. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the gains from improving user experience do not trickle down to them enough. After all, many many teams will claim credit and take a slice of that pie. However, only a few teams can claim credit for ad revenue. Within a large company the goals of the company and the goals of individual teams are rarely fully aligned.

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