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This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection past columns.
Crowds on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other sites are asking their followers to pay to support them. We can do this for accessing extras like personal chats or a newsletter from our favorite online personality, or for the good vibes that come from supporting the online businesses we love.
And if there’s one thing that unites many people trying to monetize their fan payouts, it’s resentment at Apple.
You may know that some app makers are angry. Based on fees collected by Apple From some digital purchases in iPhone apps. If you buy extra lives from a video game app or subscribe to a dating service on your iPhone, Apple collects 30 cents of every dollar you spend.
However, many people who earn income from their online work also pay these fees indirectly to Apple.
Here is an example: Let’s say you like this bike channel on youtube and click your iPhone’s YouTube app to sign up for $5 a month. Your money is split in three ways. Apple charges $1.50. YouTube charges $1.05. The bike channel charges $2.45, or less than half what you think you’re paying.
Many internet creators say Apple doesn’t deserve such a large portion of its earnings, as they see it as the company’s marginal involvement in creative online work and the relationship between fans. And they say Apple’s fees, in addition to fees from sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, make the already difficult creative pursuits even more difficult.
“It’s a ridiculous tax they charge for no reason,” said online personality Hank Green of Apple’s fees.
An Apple spokesperson said the fees paid to a small minority of what people do in apps are fair compensation for the company’s role in the internet economy, making it easier to pay for things from our phones. People also feel more secure when paying with a credit card registered with Apple than handing over their account information to people on YouTube or Instagram.
He stressed that Apple does not take any cuts when people pay for online personalities from a web browser or use virtual tip jars on apps like Twitch.
This week, On Tech, economy for online creatorsPeople who are very good at having fun or sharing information online and make it a business. Tensions between creators and Apple will only grow as fan payments become more common. in popular applications and from specialist subscription services such as patreon, Fans Only and bottom stack. (OnlyFans and Substack don’t have apps. Patreon, a service for people to pay musicians, online personalities, and podcasters, doesn’t charge creators to Apple.)
Apple’s fees may not be a huge burden for Green and other creators who make a good living. But co-founder of a service called Jasmine Rice, fan house For people to subscribe to video creators, he said, payments to Apple could mean months of rent or other expenses for the vast majority of people rushing to generate income from their online business.
fan house Engaged in a public fight with Apple last year to pressure the company to change creators’ fees. Rice agrees that his company refuses to waive its commissions from Apple or get your share of 10 percent commission That Fanhouse collects from creators rather than the full amount fans pay. Apple said no, he said, giving Rice and Fanhouse a six-month grace period to pay all fees.
Something I’ve heard over and over from these online pros is that Apple stands in the way not only of creators’ earnings, but also of promising ideas.
Li Jin, an investor in internet creative companies, said that Apple has encountered business ideas that cannot be implemented as their fees erode profit potential.
“There are so many mouths to feed, and the cutoff in in-app revenue is really high,” Jin said. (HE Wrote More on this from last year.)
The income potential for the internet economy and content creators would be much smaller if Apple didn’t help make smartphones the most popular computers in history. But now, we see that the norms and financial systems established in the early days of digital life have left the internet of 2022 behind from time to time.
Tomorrow on Tech: how an online personality makes money from digital business in millions of different ways.
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