The person who owned the domain was kind enough to post his page analytics for the few months that his site was in operation:
Notice that this person had 250,353 unique visitors to his site. From here we can do some rudimentary, albeit naive, mathematics.
Now, to make the math dead simple, let's assume 250,000 visitors to the website were bona fide teenage virgin pirates. I'll discount the difference of 353 because at least 1 of them was me, 1 was Apple, 1 was their lawyers, and because App Store developers are quite aware of the piracy of their applications. Moreover some people may have accidentally stumbled upon the site when searching for pictures of monkey balls.
Let's assume, again, for simplicity, that the price bracket is $0.99.
If every hairy palmed pirate downloads 1 application then we have a lower-bound loss of:
1 (download) * 250,000 (hairy palms) * $0.99 = $247,500
Now the maximum number of applications that an iPhone can hold is 144. This gives us a theoretical upper-bound loss of:
144 (download) * 250,000 (hairy palms) * $0.99 = $35,640,000
Realistically, only the pirate with the hairiest of palms would have this many applications on their phone. So for the sake of argument let's assume the average pirate downloads 10 applications then we have:
10 (download) * 250,000 (hairy palms) * $0.99 = $2,475,000
In even the minimum case this is a significant amount of cheddar. If 25 developers evenly shared the revenue from $247,500 that would be $9900 for each developer before Apple's cut of your pie.
Whether or not $0.99 applications like WooHoo or the Chuck Norris Joke Generator deserve any of this is left for another post.
QED.
9 comments:
I've been reading your blog for a while, with interest, because I'm an iPhone developer.
I think you have made 2 fairly big assumptions though.
The first is that if there was no way to pirate something like Super Monkey Ball, then every single one of those 'virgin pirates' would have bought the game. I think that's a fairly ridiculous assumption, because it doesn't hold true for PC games, movies or music, so why should it on the iPhone.
The second is that as a developer you can and should do anything about piracy. I think no matter how much checking a developer or Apple does, piracy is a reality, just ask the PC & Console games business. As a developer, I'm not going to spend time chasing pirates, they're idiots not worthy of my time, I'd much rather spend it building and rewarding my customers.
Thanks for your informative site, like I say I've been following it with interest, but I'm not going to waste my time chasing down mythical revenue that doesn't actually exist.
Dear rusty,
I find it amusing that you point out the assumptions in a posting with the word 'naive' as the very first word of its title.
I find it disappointing that you're an iPhone developer that just gives up and is willing to lay down in front of a Mack Truck. You're a quitter. A doormat. Don't let these greasy haired teenagers with low self-esteem walk all over you. YOU, SIR, ARE SMARTER THAN THAT. My step-mom always told me that quitters never win. She was a carton-a-day smoker, and guess what -- she never quit.
You've been brain-washed into accepting the reality of piracy. This is propaganda generated the bootlegging machine on a pirate ship. BREAK FREE OF YOUR MIND SHACKLES. This socialist/robin hood propaganda is counter-capitalism. It's anti-American. It's not patriotic.
In all seriousness: suppose you're the guys at Tapulous. You take a great concept like Twitter and extended it with location-aware tweets, neat pictures, and a rotating globe. You call it Twinkle and release it for free on the App Store.
Now you, as the guys at Tapulous, think how the hell do we make money off the time we put into this? Our venture capital is running out, Apple got bored of us, so how do we monetize our API, our source code, our developers, or any of our assets?
Well, you figure it out and call it Project X, some sort of location-aware, social networking application and release it for $0.99 on the App Store.
Five hours later, it's been wrung through Crackulous and is available FREE for download.
Now you have people using YOUR program, YOUR server space, YOUR bandwidth, YOUR shit. YOUR paying customers help finance this. Do you think they'd appreciate subsidizing the use of your program so someone else can use it for free? Now THAT is ridiculous.
Maybe, you think, you'll put your head into the sand and it'll go away. Maybe you don't need to pay the bills this month. Maybe your developers don't need a pay cheque this week.
Give me a break.
Dear rusty,
This is my soap box. I rule here. And like any great dictator, please do as I say and not as I do.
And for the record: I have never ever pirated an application, downloaded music, or used P2P to watch movies or TV.
I am without digital sin and I have cast the first stone.
Are you associated with http://www.haklab.com, the guy against cracked apps??
Dear anonymous,
No, I am not associated with Haklab. While this Mr. Haklab has admirable goals, his means to reach his ends run contrary to my own.
For instance, he takes a pro-active stance against repositories used by file sharers.
Like Ghandi, I use a passive aggressive approach to piracy. I've provided a small example of code to detect compromise so you, as an intrepid and enterprising App Store developer, can gauge the effect of piracy on your application sales.
No offense to Mr. Haklab, but he also has brutal spelling and grammar and he lacks a certain finesse when it comes to the English language.
Love it, keep up the good work.
(Talk about late)
lol @ the mind shackling comment. Usually it's the people fighting against piracy that's spreading the "brainwashing propaganda."
Anyways, have you ever been to youtube? To preview a song perhaps, to find new music, to watch a short clip (a great fight scene, for example) of something you never intended on buying?
How bout going to myspace to listen to a certain bands music?
Not saying that you're a pirate by doing so, but the concept is similar - Copyrighted content being distributed through a medium.
Now, if you can still answer "Innocent of all charges" then I've failed in trying to deliver to you a perspective. But, if you are guilty, well... Who isn't? C:
Helo, your blog is really good, I like it very much!By the way, if you like NHL Jersey you can come here to have a look!
NHL Jersey
Blake Wheeler Jerseys
Milan Lucic Jerseys
Patrice Bergeron Jerseys
Phil Esposito Jerseys
Phil Kessel Jerseys
Ray Bourque Jerseys
Tim Thomas Jerseys
Tyler Seguin Jerseys
Zdeno Chara Jerseys
Boston Bruins Jerseys
Chris Chelios Jerseys
Chris Osgood Jerseys
Gordie Howe Jerseys
Henrik Zetterberg Jerseys
Marian Hossa Jerseys
Mattias Ritola Jerseys
Mike Modano Jerseys
Nicklas Lidstrom Jerseys
Pavel Datsyuk Jerseys
Steve Yzerman Jerseys
Ted Lindsay Jerseys
Detroit Red Wings
Chicago Blackhawks Jerseys and
Pittsburgh Penguins Jerseys
Montreal Canadiens
Edmonton Oilers
Philadelphia Flyers
Tampa Bay Lightning
Post a Comment