7 ms·
> And takes 30% of everything you make. Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero? Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
> And takes 30% of everything you make.
Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero?
Users will pay for apps (not much, as a rule, but something), but will not pay for web sites. Third-party advertisers might pay, if you're lucky, and if you don't mind treating your users as a commodity, but the users themselves will not.
- lj3 9y ago> but will not pay for web sites. Subscriptions to web-based services don't count as paying for web sites?
- artificial 9y agoHow many people would you say subscribe to something they pay for online? For example news? The pool of subscribers for magazines and news is an ever shrinking pie. I know of no one in the last three jobs that maintains a subscription that’s under under age 40.
- Frank2312 9y agoNetflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions. Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for. If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it. Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoThey're also not exactly something a developer can launch and start making money off of. Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?
- klez 9y ago> Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird? I don't do that on the app store either. And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?
- eitland 9y agoI happily pay for games and apps, including upgrades if they are valuable to me. I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.
- skinnymuch 9y agoFlappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoWhat makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule? There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.
- vonmoltke 9y agoThe number of apps in all app stores combined that are profitable from store sales is also likely a rounding error.
- skinnymuch 9y agoHow many apps are profitable and of those how many are made by independent people?
- Turing_Machine 9y agoMore than one out of 50 million, you can bet.
- skinnymuch 9y agoAre you saying there’s only like 30 sites with a subscription model that are profitable?
- iand 9y agoHere are some of the online services that I subscribe to, delivered over the web: Github, AWS, pinboard.in, spotify, ancestry.com Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.
- peteey 9y agoNews is free on the web and free as an app. You are not making a distinction. I paid nothing for my NPR and BBC apps.
- thrill 9y agoThe BBC is fully funded by the government (i.e. the taxpayer). NPR claims they are minimally funded by the government but sure does fight hard to keep that supposed 2%. But the main point is that someone else had to pay for what you espouse as free.
- DanBC 9y agoAbout a quarter of its revenue comes from BBC Worldwide selling BBC content to markets outside the UK.
- eitland 9y agoHappy blendle user. Love to be able to pay for quality content. Same with Spotify. Both models are OK with me. What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.
- addicted 9y agoAnd all those magazines and newspapers also have apps, yet that hasn’t somehow led to floods of money pouring into their coffers.
- untog 9y agoThis feels like kind of an aside - do those under 40s you know readily pay for news apps, but not for web subscriptions? If not it's not really related to the issue at hand.
- elif 9y agoConfidence in news is also an ever shrinking pie. Not a great example.
- alkonaut 9y agoThe only way people would pay for web sites in the extent they pay for apps is if it’s as convenient. I don’t want to log in to get the paid benefits for example. I don’t want to enter my cc details to pay the subscription if it could be avoided by “the store” already knowing it, and so on. In the end reality is that I just pass on buying subscriptions and would probably prefer buying subscriber access to a website if they made an app facade for the site that handled payment and login. The UX of web sites and subscriptions is that bad.
- EADGBE 9y agoWith Stripe's integration of Apple Pay/Google Pay are you more willing or less willing to pay to use a web site?
- zeveb 9y ago> Compared to a website, where you get to keep 100% of zero? There's more to the Internet than websites. Believe it or not, there are lots of protocols out there, not just HTTP.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe parent explicitly said "websites".