News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story. Parent comment

Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by jicea on Tuesday April 09, 2013 @02:44PM (#5520212)
Hi, I'm one of the developer of Meon https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/meon/id400274934?mt=8 . We have been promoted twice by App Gratis, each time we've never paid anything. The App Gratis campaign generated more than 400K downloads and push us in the first place in the French App Store (for a few days). Of course App Gratis use iTunes affiliation to get revenues, but they didn't charge us for anything.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by daemon13 on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @04:40AM (#5523904)
Re >> Of course App Gratis use iTunes affiliation to get revenues, but they didn't charge us for anything.

Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean that Apply is paying some kind of affiliate fee? And what happens if the app is free of charge (FOC)?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by jicea on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @11:21AM (#5525667)
I'm always surprised that iTunes affiliation is not very well known. It's in fact the base of a lot of business model: Apps Gratis, Free App the Day etc... Assuming you're sending a customer to the App Store from your app or your website, by any means (link to a free app, link to a paid app etc...), you're becoming an App Store affiliate and get a percentage of everything that buys this customer for 72 hours. I think this percentage is something like 5%...

Affiliation is not limited to Apple App Store, affiliation exists also on Amazon for instance, but not on Google Play, for the moment.

It's important to note that you can becomes affiliate even if your send a customer to the App Store with a free app (for instance Angry Birds Lite), and that at any time there is only one affiliate by device: that's why any apps recommendation will send you push notification each day to remain the current affiliate. And affiliation is not directly managed by Apple but by LinkShare for US, and TradeDoubler for Europe.

A last thing, doing affiliation is really easy:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meon/id400274934?mt=8 => a link to my app without any affiliation

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meon/id400274934?mt=8&par... => a link to my app with Linkshare identifier (partnerId=30) and my company identifier (siteID=pPE4bVE6DtE)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by hboon on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @06:47AM (#5524314)
See http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/ as well as http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentati...

iTunes affiliates get a cut of 5% of all purchases within 72 hours, not just for the originating app (or media).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by simonholroyd on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @08:35AM (#5524680)
> For zero dollar sales of apps, you will not see any transactions reported.

Aren't most of the apps that AppGratis links to discounted to free for the day. Apple doesn't pay commission on free downloads, right?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by hboon on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @08:43AM (#5524699)
They don't. But let's say you click and buy another app or IAP within that 72 hour window, the affiliate gets a cut.
[ Parent | on HN ]