One of the things I’ve spent some time doing for companies and clients is trying to work around the “Apple tax”, i.e. the 30% cut Apple takes from the proceeds of things you sell on their platforms. And it’s not just me. Over the last five years or so I’ve seen lots of companies attempt to cargo cult their way into building “parallel platforms” to the Apple App Store.

I’ve been trying to calmly explain that 30% in exchange for one of the largest, most well-tended and poised-to-purchase audiences in history is probably a deal. Not to mention the built in marketing, accounting, and compliance Apple gives you and which you don’t have to build or maintain.

It’s especially a deal when you consider how much we’ve spent orienting our businesses around “free” stuff—like Google’s algorithm or TikTok—that have left us high and dry. If businesses had the dollars back that we’ve spent on SEO-optimized drivel and snake oil instead of high quality website content, or on videos of people doing dances instead of real, human stories about how people use our products and services, we would see how 30% is basically a steal.

No one is going to help you “earn” billions of dollars on a “free” platform like Google, TikTok, or Instagram. To me even the concept of huge, complex media strategies that involve those kinds of tools is somewhat ridiculous; these platforms are fickle and they build audiences based on patterns of addiction and attention seeking which are not sustainable. And when they go away, you have no recourse. You can’t sue TikTok for terms of service when they go dark on a Tuesday and you still had 40 videos in your queue of people doing dances to your insurance company’s jingle for “virality”.

With Apple you can at least point to a real contract, and real money changing hands—tangible things that might actually be helpful should you ever find you need to enforce the terms of your agreement. The Apple tax gives you a little skin in the game that likely makes middle managers at Apple think twice before they make sweeping changes to the App store. Meta (obviously) won’t think twice before they go and chase whatever hype wave they think will make them money, like, oh I don’t know, becoming the social network of record for the American fascist movement. They don’t owe you or your company shit. What’s more, they’ve proven that they don’t care even when the actually do have contracts with publishers.

Ceding huge swaths of your marketing and promotional budgets to other companies, who then sell ads based on the content you produce as a business, is utterly insane. Further, it’s really strange to feel like this needs to be explained to a class of business owners that considers itself to be the most savvy, the smartest, the best and the brightest in world history.

— Nick Jones