On Feb 17, 2011, at 3:07 PM, Josh Smift wrote: > The change is that if I'm someone who sells content subscriptions, this > new functionality takes a 30% cut out of my sales. If I want to recover > that cost by charging users of the new functionality, I can't, unless I'm > also willing to charge users of the old method.
But you weren't able to sell content subscriptions on iOS to begin with, so there were no sales that you could book before this new feature was made available. You had zero before. Now you have 70% of something more than zero. Which is larger? Moreover, since Apple has built all the distribution channel methods required to make it as trivially easy as possible to deliver your content to your subscribers, it seems reasonable that they should be able to charge for that. And if you want to develop your own content delivery methods that you make available to other subscribers, that's going to be a cost that should be billed only to those other subscribers -- and it's likely to cost you a lot more than 30% of your sales to those subscribers to do that. So, for your 30%, you gain access to a very wide array of potential customers who can now purchase your content and have as close to effortless delivery of that content to them as possible. What you might lose on individual sales due to that 30% you much more than make up for by economies of scale and freedom from having to handle all the details of the individual transactions. Compare that to your other content delivery methods which might be able to give you access to more total customers but not in any one single market, certainly can't give you anywhere remotely close to the same ease of access to those customers, certainly can't give you the same ease of transaction handling and actual distribution, and would certainly cost you more than 30% sales for each of those customers to develop and maintain -- not to mention the fact that it would take months or years to develop and deploy. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
