[spacebanana7]

I recommend spending some time on OnlyFans to see what social networks can look like without the App Store.

Video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive live streams and tiered subscriptions all work together to allow creators to flourish financially.

Apple’s 30% rules cripples YouTube’s ability to imitate these features and even restricts the viability of these features for platforms like Patreon who have a critical chunk of their engagement coming from iOS

[pen2l]

Nearly everything in that space comes with a sea of confounding factors; biological imperative is fickle thing. I find it akin to gambling, in that folks with impulse control disorder are most susceptible to making rash and often ill-advised decisions.

Point I'm trying make is you can't sensibly extrapolate lessons from there and apply them to a different space. Sadly. Because it is an absolute cashcow and I reckon it probably makes for like a quarter of Stripe's income.

[spacebanana7]

Social interaction can be just as much of a biological imperative as reproduction.

I bet many people would be willing to pay $500 for a FaceTime call with MrBeast. Or pay $50 to choose which makeup their vlogger tries on. Maybe even $100 for their favourite comedian to make a joke about them.

[tiedieconderoga]

What you're describing is parasocial interaction, not social interaction.

[mywacaday]

One person was willing to pay a lot more: https://www.essentiallysports.com/esports-news-mrbeast-recal...

I was initially horrified when I read it first but then realised it would be like someone with $100k paying out $25 for a birthday present.

[manmal]

> Video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive live streams and tiered subscriptions

As a user, that doesn’t sound great to be honest.

[rchaud]

Are you a user of this particular product though?

I personally don't play video games anymore because single-player is largely an afterthought, and they no longer come in a box costing $20-50. That was my mental model of the games business, but the industry has moved on to DLCs, microtransactions, subscriptions etc. And seeing as how gaming is bigger than ever, the majority appears to have accepted the pricing changes that I did not.

Similarly, those that pay for porn have likely had to adjust to the changing realities of that industry.

[manmal]

My son had loads of fun with Hogwarts Legacy, and that’s before any DLCs or multiplayer. Same with Stray, Unravel, and other titles. I agree there’s lots of games that I just don’t consider playing because of the reasons you mentioned.

[spacebanana7]

Monetisation always hurts users, it’s just a matter of picking the least painful poison.

You probably don’t enjoy VPN adverts in the middle of your YouTube videos either, but people need to get paid somehow.

[manmal]

Well there’s YT premium. One transaction per month and you’re set.

[waboremo]

Most of that is already on the app store anyways, besides the parts that don't make sense (ie "video fundraisers").

[novok]

I'm trying to think where any of this is explicitly banned. You can do subscriptions with various tiers, various one time consumable purchases and various one time permanent purchases. And things like games make this a bit easier with the ability to buy generic in game currency that you can spend within the internal game store. On top of that, if the service is not 'digital' you can use your own payment infra and skip the %30 cut. Like Uber or buying physical goods from an e-commerce store.

Like video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive paid streams and tiered subscriptions can be covered by consumable credit purchases and credit subscriptions. What are the explicit rules or history of rejections banning this?

[madeofpalk]

The App Store doesn't prevent any of this (though, the App Store won't distribute porn) - it just requires a 30% cut. What's OnlyFan's cut of all those transactions?

Youtube can imitate these features on it's website, where it can surely do a better job due to scale. Twitch does this - arguably OnlyFans is largely modelled on Twitch.

[spacebanana7]

> What's OnlyFan's cut of all those transactions?

Onlyfans takes 20%.

If Apple had a stripe connect like API which charged 30% then the business activities I mentioned would probably be viable, if painfully expensive.

To make social payments at present, a company would have take In App Purchases revenue into its own bank account then distribute those funds to creators. This usually requires some kind of money transfer licence depending on jurisdiction. There’d also be cost in performing KYC checks on all creators and covering another layer of currency conversion (again depending on jurisdiction).

That kind of setup is possible at the moment, but hard to sustain without adding at least another 10%+ to the fee.

And the operations side of managing chargebacks, payment timings and refunds through the IAP platform stacked on top of your own money transfer business would be very painful.

[madeofpalk]

Those businesses are already viable, without App Store, as evidenced by Twitch and OnlyFans.

App Store deserves plenty of criticism, Youtube's failure to produce a viable ecosystem for accepting tips for videos is not Apple's fault.

[spacebanana7]

Does Twitch allow tips inside its iOS app? Ignore the rest of comment if so.

I agree theses businesses are viable however their iOS App activities are severely limited, thus creating the missing app economy.

[madeofpalk]

Surprisingly enough, yes, Twitch does allow tips (Bits) inside its iOS app. They're 30% more expensive than on the web https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/watching-twitch-on-ios-devi.... Same with subs https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/subscriptions-on-mobile

[x0x0]

Google says OnlyFans takes 20%. However, if you look at a saas business, the general metric for a well-run business is a 50% cost ratio. That means paying 30% instead of 1-ish percent for payments is actually 60% of profits in a well-run saas business. I suspect stripping/sex work has a lower cost than engineers, marketing, CS, computers, etc.

Which goes a long way to explaining the dearth of professional tools in the app stores.

[wiseowise]

> just > 30%

30% is anything but just.

[detourdog]

I find that people making these arguments need a villain to blame to $x million. Apple's privacy protections is an easy target for why they haven't made any of the $320 billion Apple has distributed to developers since the App Store creation.

[moomoo11]

Sure, I'm glad it works that way for them. However, I'm glad Apple's rules exist so I don't have to deal with those and low-quality apps. I'm in the 98% majority that's fine with not having xxx or crap apps in the app stores.

Every time I use the android play store I'm just overwhelmed by the number of low quality crap.

[spacebanana7]

Apple’s rules on social payments primarily affect content creators and other big tech orgs like FB/YT/TT.

Whether Apple allows adult content is a separate matter from whether Apple takes a 30% cut from bloggers and video makers who produce digital content in exchange for payment.