[Gigachad]

Wasn't rent seeking meant to be referring to a party which wedges itself between a buyer and seller and skims a fee off the transaction despite not really adding much value but in some way has made themselves difficult to bypass.

Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.

[brookst]

Kind of? You’re buying into the rhetoric though.

As a developer, I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the Apple App Store. You know how much value the App Store provided me? Way, way more than the 30% I paid (this was years ago).

Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.

So we can debate fair pricing, but the idea that aggregators don’t provide any value isn’t an indictment of aggregators, it’s a confession of not understanding the business.

[Turing_Machine]

> Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.

Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.