That video is skewed to only show one side of things.
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Everyone knows that ad companies take a cut that’s a no brainer. The difference is if admob takes too much of a cut and revenue drops we can easily switch that to something else. Not only that but you’re talking about a company who is giving me money vs a company that is only taking my money.
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Sure there are a lot of companies that are going with the rev sharing but it ends up screwing over more users then it helps. Candy crush is free but they’ve made over a billion dollars off of it from people that are pretty much forced to pay for the free game. Rev sharing is essentially like mico transactions from your developers. Sure it’s not money technically coming out of my pocket but it’s blocking money from going into my pockets.
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With the pick axe scenario …that’s all fine and dandy as long as the gold miners are new. I’m a very established gold miner and if you came to me and said hey Dave I will give you this pick axe for free even though you’ve already spent thousands of dollars on my pick axes in the past, but I’m going to take 16% of your minning operations…I’d not only laugh I’d bring my whole crew over and tell them what happened so they could get a good laugh too.
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The real estate scenario is a great way to show the difference bwteen a poor / middle class person vs a person who is well off. A wealthy person would for sure take the 5k real estate agent because they know everything the house sells for above the 5k is profit. They have the extra income and it’s a smarter move to make then to give a percentage away. Apps are no different. If you have an established well off developer they know giving up a % is a dumb move. They realize that spending money upfront will net them more in the long run.
The idea of growing as I grow to me rubs me the wrong way. I’m not growing because of corona sdk I’m growing because of what I do and what my team does. Corona isn’t paying hundreds of thousands of dollars are year to promote my apps and make sure they move though the markets they way they should be. Corona isn’t running a/b tests and optimizing my user retention and session lengths. Corona isn’t paying a team of network guys to make sure our servers never go down. Corona isn’t monitoring ecpms of all the major ad networks and making sure you serve the highest paying ad network at the time. Corona isn’t running live user testing to see how users navigate the apps and see if there are any place that could be enhanced. If you guys actually helped make me money I would gladly pay you a percentage. If you told me Dave we made you an extra 5,000 this month but we want 50% of it I would say cool no problem, you deserve it. That’s not the case though you are saying Dave good job on making us money this month.
Simply put corona just allows me to program a little easier compared to native. Beyond that though there are a ton of other frameworks out there that would allow me to do what I’m already doing. I love personally corona I just think there needs to be another option. It seems like you are against the subscription model so what about rev sharing until you reach 1000$ paid in for the year. Then after that you’re no longer rev sharing you paid in your dues and the rest are for the user? What about the ability to purchase an ad plugin for X amount or use it free with rev sharing. There are a bunch of ways corona can make money from me and I’m willing to pay up. I don’t want to be forced out of corona sdk and have to use corona enterprise because I want to avoid rev sharing. There has to be a way we can both benefit without me paying 200k a year.
What about three versions of the AD plugin?
Free Ad Plugin but 20% cut.
$499/y plugin but 10% cut capped to $100k.
$1,999/y Ad plugin with 5% cut capped at $10k/y.
If Corona wants to do this for their own Corona Ads network then I’m all for it. It’s their network, their infrastructure, they have to handle the advertisers, etc, so of course they should get their share. But to take that much just because they provide us an api to a 3rd party network that any developer here could have made and shared for free in the marketplace (take a look at the Chartboost plugin from Ingemar) just doesn’t make sense to me.
> What about the ability to purchase an ad plugin for X amount or use it free with rev sharing
What about three versions of the AD plugin?
Free Ad Plugin but 20% cut.
$499/y plugin but 10% cut capped to $100k.
$1,999/y Ad plugin with 5% cut capped at $10k/y.
Divides the risk between the axe seller and the miner?
If I was to implement Ad’s I would prefer a 20% cut under $50k then 10% cut under $100k and 5% cut over $100k.
The market place and selling plugins may be a good way for corona to get income (core API’s free) and say Augmented Reality, Siri, TouchID, iWatch, HealthKit would be paid plugins that you opt into.
I am not interested in Corona Cloud as I use digitalocean.com self managed servers and IBM cloudant.com (CouchDB) and it costs peanuts.
I do think Corona need a way to make money from the platform though. The good thing is they have a plan.
#3 would be the cheapest at 12k per year and in my opinion that’s way too much. Unity which is way more robust then corona sdk probably ever will be is what 1k I think it is for life. I personally think that it should be capped at what corona enterprise cost. So no matter what you will never be charged more then what the top license is.
I agree, Corona is a classic “Value Proposition” business model.
“You give value up front then ask for a return on your investment.”
A free platform to develop apps on is certainly good value.
A perfect example of a value based proposition business is the Sean Wes Podcast, they have hundreds of AD FREE/Quality podcasts to help people identify, do and make a living from their passion.
Check out the podcasts here: http://seanwes.com/podcast-archive/
All they ask for is listeners who get value from the Podcast join the Community (where you get more value )
I think now is the time for Corona to “Ask in return”, as they cant give , give and give forever.
No one is trying to get out of paying them. I think everyone in here agrees they would be willing to pay for corona. Corona has 300,000 developers I think they said. Lets say 1% are willing to pay 500$ a year that would be 1.5 million dollars per year. Why not take the 1.5 million for the 1% and allow the 99% of the other devs to use the rev sharing.
What about three versions of the AD plugin?
Free Ad Plugin but 20% cut.
$499/y plugin but 10% cut capped to $100k.
$1,999/y Ad plugin with 5% cut capped at $10k/y.
But then a single plugin would cost more than a Enterprise license. On Corona Ads however could work.
I’m not really against the rev sharing model.
I think Corona needs a way to be profitable and the rev sharing model could work. We know Freemium works, there are tons of games and apps using this model and they’re making a lot of money. Sure, often in Freemium quality takes a dip, but I’m sure they can do better.
The problem (since the Demo/Regular, then Free/Pro and now Free/Enterprise+Card versions of Corona) is that they weren’t monetising on their entry level solution and only relaying on the Pro users wasn’t enough.
But trying to fit all developers in this Freemium model can’t possibly work.
There should be a product progression, starting from Free (with revenue share) but arriving to Professionals (Enterprise, Card and I really hope a Pro version).
The Free edition is an awesome solution for developers just starting so they don’t have to pay upfront (and at the same time Perk can monetise) , but there should be options if one day they’ll be successful (Pro version).
I’ve read many times in this post: " If you’re successful, we are successful". It’s great, but that shouldn’t just mean “ok, since we take a share, if you’re making money we’re making money”, it should be something like:
"We’ll help you grow. First with a Free edition with revenue share so you don’t have to worry about licenses and you can just start releasing your app and making money today.
But at the same time, we want you to succeed. We want you one day to be able to call this your day job and Corona your favourite SDK.
And when you’ll decide to take your app development to the next step, here’s our Corona Pro line."
… Actually that bring me to ask: What are the plans of Perk regarding their license based products (Enterprise / Card)?
It is kinda the odd one out Simon.
Right now we have:
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Corona SDK
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Corona Enterprise Small Business at $948/year
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Corona Enterprise Unlimited at $2388/year, with a bunch of things maybe useful to larger team (not really sure)
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Corona Cards at $499 for platform (iOS / android / WP free for now)
Corona Enterprise is something for very specific needs. I guess it’s useful for dev teams that need to tweak and access native code. Not really sure the benefits of Unlimited, besides having no revenue limit (the basic Enterprise has a $500k limit).
Cards does something basically similar but it’s simpler and in short you can add a Corona View directly in a UIView in xCode.
Both Enterprise and Cards allow you to add native plugins, so just using those two solutions you can add your own ad network and skip the revenue sharing discussion.
These products (Enterprise & Cards) in theory should be aimed to very specific dev needs, but if the revenue share model will be applied on other ad platforms they’ll be the only logical, although flawed, solutions for pro users.
I’ll probably just move to Cards, since getting both licenses is around $1k and it’s simpler to implement than Enterprise. But as you said… what if corona ditch these pro solutions?
I mean, I’d really like to know what are the plans with Enterprise and Cards before switching…
> PXL artificer
It sounds like Enterprise is the odd one out? Maybe corona should ditch it or tweak it?
I’d like to pay to go enterprise (or a step below enterprise) but I can’t see the extra value or reason for the extra hastle.
They are great for those who need it, but a lot of what I love about corona goes away with enterprise or cards. You can’t just do ads.show() to show an ad you have to load in the jar files, modify the manifest, place the code into java and then hook up a listener so the lua files can speak with java. It’s just a lot of extra work to do simple things.
+1
I would not even bother simulating all the calculations above because taking revenue share from our ad monetisation is unfair. I am very appreciative for Corona SDK, and I was paying for the Pro version before it became free.
However, I am using Corona SDK because it helps us to develop apps faster, writing less codes and deploying across multiple platforms (this is the main and only reason) - so we have MORE TIME to handle/struggle with other components of this business to succeed.
I would not argue if Corona takes rev share for Corona Ads (which ad network does not?), because becoming an ad network you’re building an entire infrastructure & having to deal with other ad networks and advertisers - to deliver optimized ads (which we developers want no part of/unable to do so due to our scale).
So Roj, if Corona really wants rev share from ad networks (except for Corona Ads), please make an official statement on your website and give us a timeframe to migrate away from Corona SDK - because this is not what we signed up for.
Ben
Roj,
To echo the earlier posters.
Please do not add the revenue share model to Vungle, AdMob and Chartboost (pre-existing monetization options) without some degree of notice.
Definitely. As the other said, please don’t add the rev share on the ad plugins we already have (admob etc). Or at least, give us a few months notice before doing that, so we can have enough time to decide what to do.
Agreed. Months rather than weeks is needed. Thanks.
Taking revenue share from developers’ ad monetization rather than typical software licensing models for using Corona SDK - this is a fundamental business model issue and i think Corona has already hinted to us developers where they are going with this. What i see now is, rather than choosing to make this public on their website, they have chosen to announce them in selected/newer plugins. It is a matter of time before older plugins are deprecated & replaced with newer versions, each with a revenue share clause.
I am deeply unhappy about this. I don’t want to be locked down and I am already weighing options.
Ben.
Hi all,
I’m not quite sure where this rumor/panic originated about Corona suddenly attaching a revenue share to every monetization plugin including AdMob and Vungle. Each plugin will be treated uniquely, and our goal is to offer a wide array of monetization options to help you succeed while also continuing to offer Corona SDK at absolutely zero cost to you.
We have been completely forthcoming about documenting and announcing every plugin which involves revenue sharing, including two additional blog announcements for the Facebook Audience Network plugin: we listened to the developer community, reduced it from 20% to a “tiered” structure (with an announcement), then to a flat 5% as it currently stands (with another announcement). So we’re definitely not attempting to “hide” anything.
Best regards,
Brent
Also even if they switch the Admob extension over night, it won’t impact your already deployed apps. Those would already have the old version baked in.
For our part as a developer making all our revenue from ads and as a long time corona user, (and supporter by having Pro and Enterprice licenses for years) it’s a big concern for us that Corona is moving towards a revenue share model. We’ve been looking at integrating AppLovin for our games using the new plugin, but the 5% revenue share just feels like a big ripoff, as it would cost us thousands of $ per year. It would be a pretty bad business decision. We could buy like 100 Unity Pro licenses with that. Maybe it’s a model that could work if you’re a tiny/hobby developer just starting out, but if you have a running business using Corona it doesn’t make sense to pay the price you’re asking for here. Hence the “panic”, at least on our part.
Maybe allow Enterprise license users to use the plugin without paying the revenue share? Or at least put a ceiling in there, at a reasonable leve / year or something.
As far as I remember Corona already gets a cut from revenues from existing Ad-Networks. If I recall 15% from Vungle. Don’t have a number from AdBuddiz, but for sure they take a share. I assume it exists in other ad-networks plug-ins they implemented.
What? I had no idea? We’re using the Vungle plugin - can someone from Corona confirm this?
The numbers provided by run37 are untrue re: figures.