[mellinwood]

Fair/unfair, whatever.

This move immediately makes many subscription billing models that touch iOS uneconomical. You can't give up 30% of what you bill your customers in perpetuity. The long-established economic model for customer acquisition is to pay a cost of customer acquisition, and then you have a calculation to determine time to customer profitability. You have to have some astonishing margins to be able to give away 30% FOREVER to Apple and make that work. I can't imagine it works for Netflix--I think they are paying ~$60 per customer and probably seeing profitability in 6-12 months. Can they really have margins great enough for them to justify participating in a market with rents like this?

I suppose another way to see it is that these customers shared with Apple will be MUCH LESS valuable to companies.

I'd be interested to see what the numbers look like for Dropbox, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. Everyone with a lower-margin model is hosed. Does anyone have some real-world acquisition costs they've run against this change?