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As someone who's worked on a few ad supported apps, I have to admit that I share Zuck's sentiment. How do we make money if few are willing to pay for apps and
by asow92 3y ago
As someone who's worked on a few ad supported apps, I have to admit that I share Zuck's sentiment. How do we make money if few are willing to pay for apps and ads don't pay enough?
- CharlesW 3y ago> How do we make money if nobody is willing to pay for apps… App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022. Small developers on the App Store grew revenue by 71 percent over the past two years. People are absolutely willing to pay for apps and in-app purchases.
- asow92 3y agoThat data means nothing without looking at the share of the distribution of each developer account.
- CharlesW 3y agoIt means that people are willing to pay for apps. As with any product endeavor, success isn't evenly distributed — a small percentage of developers ("small" or not) are making interesting and/or useful apps that have achieved product/market fit. The rest follow Sturgeon's law and/or don't know how to find their audience.
- coldpie 3y agoMaybe your app just isn't worth the downsides of building an unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. I'm sorry =/ If we destroy the panopticon, perhaps we can find new business models that aren't as destructive.
- asow92 3y agoWhat about journalism?
- coldpie 3y agoWhat about it? Most of the big names seem to be switching to a paywall model, which is fine with me. A local outlet has an almost entirely reader-supported model that seems to be working for them[1]. There are options other than the global surveillance panopticon, and the more we support those options, the more viable they will become. [1] https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july-2023 https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july...
- asow92 3y agoAs someone who works with a national news outlet, I can tell your for certain that paywalls are failing, and we're now considering how to recoup lost revenue with ads that don't pay as well as they did five years ago.
- coldpie 3y agoThat sucks, but I'm still zero percent interested in supporting the unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. Don't blame me that Facebook & Google destroyed your business model!
- asow92 3y agoThe alternative is that—without an act of congress—private journalism will die, and that is a tragedy.
- eropple 3y agoThe obvious answer is "don't." I just looked, and I've spent $250 on mobile apps this year. They are all mobile applications that do useful things for me, be it improvements to HomeKit or media creation tools--Affinity has me for like $150 by themselves this year! If your mobile apps don't make money without invasive ad targeting, that's OK: others clearly can (see the sibling commenter), and we can get by with fewer mobile apps that don't when they are are presenting so thin a value proposition as to be unable to get users to pay for them through conventional means. The "hard men / strong times" line in your profile (which, to be candid, is a pretty gross pretext for a lot of bad-actor politics, but you picked it not me) echoes deep here: there are plenty of endeavors that sell something people want enough to pay actual money for them, and you can always do that instead. I haven't worked for an ad-supported tech business since my first job out of college in 2010, and most of their business was actually in air travel and hotel bookings, the ads were tertiary. The jobs and the products exist. Let's unleash the hot take cannon for a second: users basically don't need apps. Businesses do--and there's a ton of money in LOB mobile apps even--but almost every B2C mobile application I can think of is some form of luxury good. Making the case for a luxury good is harder than making one for one of self-evident value. Congratulations--you picked hard mode, and nobody is obligated to make it easier. Optimize for making value to people who will pay for it, not virality or shareability, and perhaps you have a path to not needing to play with edgy patterns.
- asow92 3y agoYou aren't the average user. Most users can't even afford decent housing or food. Let alone $250/year for apps, and they will never pay. I'm sorry, but I think we just have fundamental disagreements about what software is.
- eropple 3y agoWe do disagree. But one of us is describing, and one of us is depending, and that skews things a little, doesn't it? Upton Sinclair had a line about this. What value, in a sane system, does selling advertising that targets people who "can't even afford decent housing or food" actually do? How are the goods you are selling--human attention--actually turning into revenue for the advertiser if the user has no money to act on the advertising? Or is it just one more iteration on a mutual deception that exists to create a predicate for "any of these mobile apps are worth creating in the first place"? You're building a bigger house of cards with every post.
- joerobot 3y agoYou make money by not assuming people won't pay for apps. I'll happily pay for an app that serves a purpose for me and makes my life easier. If your app is good enough, people will pay for it. I'm more likely to uninstall an app with ads. Believe it or not, I don't want to sit through ads for the latest castle crasher or casino game that I'll never install.
- asow92 3y agoWould you agree that the average hacker news user isn't the average app user? Most app users don't care at all if they don't have to pay.
- joerobot 3y agoSure, but those average users are my family and friends. I don't think their privacy deserves to be invaded either. Average users purchase apps too.
- photonerd 3y agoMost average users I know HATE ads. They understand that every app has them but they’re in the same boat as the user you responded to: much more likely to uninstall an ad based app
- asow92 3y agoThat's the beauty we lost with targeted ads: less ads for the user, and more revenue for the app. There were obviously issues with that model, but it was a better experience for most people.
- nullstyle 3y ago“Less ads for the User” That does not track with my experience at all. Ad prevalence has only increased over time.
- 3y ago
- ksec 3y agoYou really shouldn't be asking that here. HN is basically anti ads. Tracking / Targeted or not. As has been the case since somewhere around 2016.
- asow92 3y agoIt's not easy being unpopular, but it sure is interesting :)
- elishah 3y ago> HN is basically anti ads. Tracking / Targeted or not. As has been the case since somewhere around 2016. That's hardly unique to this site, and hardly as recent as 2016. I would say that we can trace people with an understanding of technology being anti-ad back to at least 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters?useskin=vector
- scarface_74 3y agoIf you can’t make a product that convinces enough people to give you money, that seems like a you problem
- asow92 3y agoWe can make a product that gives us money, but wouldn't it be nice to have more money?
- scarface_74 3y agoWell, as they say on r/cscareerquestions, you could always “grind LeetCode and work for a FAANG”
- c1sc0 3y agoWe never should have gone beyond context-based ads. Hyper-targeting just feeds the enshittification of everything. The advertising business was doing just fine before the web.
- asow92 3y agoCould your qualify that with an example of “enshittification” as you call it?