Cutting the 30% and gaining it all

What would the future of a Hive app marketplace look like?

Both Google Play and Apple Store take 30% of APP sales and in-app purchases, which is a pretty steep "handling fee" if you consider that in the first half of 2019, app sales were around 40B dollars, meaning that with the two largest markets took around 12 billion in revenue.

Is this price too high?

Well, that depends on how one looks at it as distribution at that level is far out of reach of pretty much any individual or other marketplaces, no matter how great their app might be - so they are willing to pay. The reason is that these markets are integrated into the devices the applications are going to be used upon - meaning that they are the default option for consumers and due to this, they have their own gravity for both developers and buyers.

Pre-viral

I am old enough to remember the pre-internet days of marketing and watched the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller on TV - I was three. Back then, distribution was a far more manual affair than it is now and research into target markets were vital as there was far less social drive to take something viral. The costs for marketing were immense and required large amounts of producer and label backing, which is why back thin those days, the stars were stars, global phenomena - whereas now, there are many, many more flash in the pan artists that make insane amounts on the back of a song or two - then disappear.

Barriers lowered

The internet changed this and put marketing reach into increasingly more hands by lowering the barriers of entry into markets and therefore, marketing communication increased exponentially to swamp our senses to the point that there is far, far too much information flowing through our environment to focus. It is because of this massive stream that the filters and aggregators became so important and then those who ran them, like Google, very quickly realized the power they held over information and how they could leverage it to increase their profit and control.

Power of knowledge control

Information is the currency of the internet and it is through the direction and misdirection of it that the side-effect of it can be gathered, money. Knowledge is Power, because it can be used for control, manipulation and to predict behaviors and outcomes; and the knowledge that a handful of corporations have access to at a granular level means that they hold not only the reigns over us as end users, but the political systems that they operate within, meaning that they are not within the system at all.

The gap in the market

As far as I can see at this point, the only potential way out of this situation where a handful controls everything is to independently build systems that puts information back into the hands of those who create it. Us. While so far the blockchain industry has been focused primarily on the financial side of information flow, the future of communication flow and verification is going to take an increasing focus with one of the largest driving forces being the continual crushing of freedom of speech and information, censorship and punishment for being out-of-line with centralized opinion.

Freedom of society

While a lot of people might not see it yet, blockchain and crypto is likely going to play a pivotal supporting role in shifting society away from centralized control. Supporting because it is not the savior, it is infrastructure, the only savior there is is again, Us. It is through our consumer decisions that we have got into this predicament and that is also the way out. Many people want crypto to do well so that they can buy a better level in the centralized world, a more expensive cage, but a cage nonetheless.

Freedom of development

But, this isn't going to be an overnight process as we have come to rely heavily on authority and corporation to provide for us, rather than developing ways to provide for ourselves. One of the core utilizations of blockchain is as a trustless network, of dPOS is the ability to have stake based voting (I will write a separate article on this at some point).

While we are in the primitive stages of the new governance shift, it is slowly happening and what that means is that what we rely on needs to be replaced by systems that are not controlled by single-point entities with the core tenet of profit at any cost. The tenet itself is pretty much what will happen, but the problem is when the power is in the hands of so few, as the benefits of the free market system gets lost to corruption and economies of scale that drive for a monopoly.

The free market

I don't mean the free market system, I mean a marketplace where development is free to submit, where there are no checks and balances on what is submitted and no middleman that takes a cut for distribution. This doesn't mean everything is for free, it means that it is up to us how and what we use and pay for, including how developers approach and grow their ideas in the market. Hive offers this in many ways and the Hive Development Fund is one of those mechanisms in place, as are our stakes and preferences as users, our skills as developers and marketers and our willingness to submit our talents to develop an immature space into something that holds all the value of us, the community.

Communities are valuable because of what information they can distribute to accomplish tasks that are too large for individuals alone. "Communication" itself means to "make common" which is something that the large holders of collected knowledge use to control the masses they collect from - as they pick and choose who, what, where and how information is distributed to as "common knowledge", meaning that it is not necessarily common at all, it is compartmentalized and market segmented to maximize profit and control.

Building freedom

Hive has the potential to at least start advancing the steps toward a free internet where we the people begin to take back control of our digital lives and in so doing, our analogue lives also. The front that many focus on is the immutability and censorship resistance that the blockchain provides text and the likes of @threespeak are looking to offer for other media forms like video.

However, one of the key usecases is a market for the developers to build upon and connect to without having to jump through corporate hoops first to get listed, then continually pay whatever gains they make back to the centralized distributor. If you consider that they take 30% of APP earnings, a marketplace that takes zero because it is silent infrastructure and has no overheads is a better deal and means that the app developers can offer better prices to the end users or, return the difference to incentivize their end users in various ways.

Growing the market

The trouble with this currently however is that there aren't enough consumers in the pool for application developers to be able to build for, not enough people willing to pay something for their product to be developed - a catch-22 situation. But, the blockchain and crypto spaces are continually growing, albeit slower than many would like and perhaps we may need. Yet this can change at anytime in the same way that an artist becomes global, internet virality.

At some point, something will trigger the consumer market into looking outside of what they currently know and this will likely come through pain and suffering, economic collapse and collapse of social freedoms. The push-back on central overreach could be the boon that the decentralized communities need for the growth needed, but the needed infrastructure, the support for that movement needs to be in place. It is not that every application needs to be developed prior, it is that the right applications are available, that the infrastructure is stable and secure and of course, it scales out to be able to provide a new home for those who exit the centralized world.

Not idealistic

While I am idealistic for the long-term future, I do not think that this is going to happen quickly and for a very long period there is going to be two or more systems in place, as well as hybrid decentralized/centralized approaches running in tandem. However, I do think that we are currently on the pathway to finding solution that can eventually lead to releasing ourselves from the grasp of the few into the support of the many.

Because of the challenges involved in getting to the future, many people think it is impossible to achieve and that might be the case now, but tomorrow could look very different. The world has advanced enormously in many ways over the last few hundred years and we are now commonly doing things that a few generations ago couldn't even dream about as it was too far out of their imagination.

Small-step development

We advance a step at a time and each step gives at least some of us a new perspective and an imaginary glimpse of the future that could one day be, common reality. While rudimentary and immature today, things could look very different a decade down the track and all of those naysayers will have forgotten their resistance and be using the technology and its benefits as if they always have.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]