At the end of April, Comixology, a popular application for buying and reading comics, refused to support IAP in the App Store. The official reason for the conflict: the developers of the service considered that 30% is too much.
Comixology sold each comic as an IAP at the standard price of $3.99, but received only about $2.80 from it. This, as you might guess, is 30% less than the platform has from each edition sold on the official website of the service.
As they write on 148Apps, in the case of paid applications, it is still possible to understand why Apple needs to pay 30%, because the “apple” company looks at such applications, updates them, provides them with space on its servers, but in the case of IAP, which almost do not require any space or any attention from the sides of the holder platform, collecting the same 30% is not very nice. For example, PayPal requires “only” 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.
However, the following point was not taken into account at 148Apps. Free applications when placed also require attention. But Apple doesn’t get anything from most free apps, because, as you know, very few people earn in the App Store (not in absolute numbers, but in percentage terms, the Pareto law also applies here). The 30% that applies to any payments is something like compensation in this context.
Anyway, it seems to us that it’s not about the greed of Comixology or the App Store, it’s about the struggle of platforms.
Comixology has been one of the highest-grossing apps in the American App Store for the past two years (it has consistently been in the Top 60). To refuse about $10.5 thousand ($15 thousand minus 30%) a day is stupid. Such an act, in fact, blocks access to iOS users who can simply find another application in which it is convenient to purchase and read comics.
So what’s the matter?
Two weeks before Comixology’s rejection of IAP in the App Store, the comic book store was acquired by Amazon. Thus, probably, the manufacturer of Kindle Fire seeks to create a kind of monopoly on the distribution of digital versions of comics. And if earlier it was enough for readers of these products to have an iPad, now to buy the latest issues of their favorite series, they will either have to tinker with buying comics via the web with further opening in Comixology, or switch to Kindle Fire, or simply install another application to purchase their favorite reading material.
How exactly they will act, I think, is not difficult to guess.
By the way, do you feel sorry for 30%? Do you think this figure is fair?
Photo: imore.com