Month: March 2021

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it hasn’t been a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.

For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias)  who’d accepted “substantial” advances and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.

However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun pointing out that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions which are subject to criticism.

Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie de Boer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances […] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.

Similarly, Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. And as part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”

Substack has responded in with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlines the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)

“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications.”

The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” —without actually naming names.

“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals – coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program – has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.

As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”

Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose positio boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself & my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”

But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.

“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it hasn’t been a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.

For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias)  who’d accepted “substantial” advances and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.

However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun pointing out that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions which are subject to criticism.

Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie de Boer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances […] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.

Similarly, Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. And as part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”

Substack has responded in with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlines the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)

“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications.”

The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” —without actually naming names.

“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals – coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program – has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.

As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”

Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose positio boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself & my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”

But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.

“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”

Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control to an individual in perpetuity.

For many companies, these supervoting shares represent a highly powerful tool, allowing founders to have their cake and eat it, too — to go public and receive the advantages of being a public company while limiting the power of external shareholders to influence how they run the company once it floats.

Some founders and their investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the short-term whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted. Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.

Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.

Snowflake’s decision

If one of the primary purposes of dual-class shares is to consolidate CEO power, then perhaps Snowflake felt they weren’t necessary, given the history of CEO-shuffling at the company. While Snowflake’s founders are still part of the organization, they hired Sutter Hill investor Mike Speiser to be their first CEO, followed by former Microsoft exec Bob Muglia before finally bringing in veteran CEO Frank Slootman to take their company public.

Without an all-powerful CEO founder in place, perhaps the company felt that supervoting shares weren’t necessary. Regardless, Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli framed the move as a decision that works for all parties when he announced that his company would abandon the special shares during its earnings call earlier this month.

“Today, we announced that on March 1st, 2021, our Class B shareholders in accordance with our governing documents converted all of our Class B common stock to Class A common stock, eliminating the dual-class structure of our common stock and ensuring that each share has an equal vote. We view this as operationally beneficial to the company and our shareholders,” Scarpelli said during the call.

Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control to an individual in perpetuity.

For many companies, these supervoting shares represent a highly powerful tool, allowing founders to have their cake and eat it, too — to go public and receive the advantages of being a public company while limiting the power of external shareholders to influence how they run the company once it floats.

Some founders and their investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the short-term whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted. Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.

Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.

Snowflake’s decision

If one of the primary purposes of dual-class shares is to consolidate CEO power, then perhaps Snowflake felt they weren’t necessary, given the history of CEO-shuffling at the company. While Snowflake’s founders are still part of the organization, they hired Sutter Hill investor Mike Speiser to be their first CEO, followed by former Microsoft exec Bob Muglia before finally bringing in veteran CEO Frank Slootman to take their company public.

Without an all-powerful CEO founder in place, perhaps the company felt that supervoting shares weren’t necessary. Regardless, Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli framed the move as a decision that works for all parties when he announced that his company would abandon the special shares during its earnings call earlier this month.

“Today, we announced that on March 1st, 2021, our Class B shareholders in accordance with our governing documents converted all of our Class B common stock to Class A common stock, eliminating the dual-class structure of our common stock and ensuring that each share has an equal vote. We view this as operationally beneficial to the company and our shareholders,” Scarpelli said during the call.

NASA doesn’t just let anyone launch whatever they want to space without checking in with the agency about potential impacts to its own assets on orbit, including the International Space Station (ISS). The agency has a standard set of guidelines around so-called “Conjunction Assessment,” which is basically determine the risk that a close approach between in-space objects might occur, which in turn could potentially result in a collision. This assessment determines when and where something flies, as you might expect.

Today, NASA published a new agreement between itself and SpaceX that goes above and beyond its standard Conjunction Assessment practices. The special agreement, which exists under the mandate of the Space Act that allows NASA to work with any company in order to fulfill its mandate, is defined as a ‘nonreimbursable’ one, or just one in which no money changes hands, which is designed to benefit both parties involved.

It effectively lays out that because SpaceX operates Starlink, which is the largest existing on-orbit constellation of spacecraft, and which is growing at a rapid pace, and because each of these is equipped with the ability to maneuver itself autonomously in response to mission parameters, there needs to exist a deeper ongoing partnership between NASA and SpaceX for conjunction avoidance.

Accordingly, the agreement outlines the ways in which communication and information sharing between NASA and SpaceX will exceed what has been typically been expected. For NASA’s part, it’ll be providing detailed and accurate info about its planned missions in advance to SpaceX so that they can use that to properly program Starlink’s automated avoidance measures whenever a mission is happening where NASA assets might cross paths with the constellation. It’ll also be working directly with SpaceX on improving its its ability to assess and avoid any incidents, and will be providing technical support on how SpaceX might better mitigate “photometric brightness,” or the reflectivity of its Starlink spacecraft.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will be responsible for ensuring its Starlink satellites take ‘evasive action’ to ‘mitigate close approaches and avoid collisions with all NASA assets.” It’ll also be required to provide time frame ‘cut-outs’ for periods when Starlink satellites aren’t able to employ their collision avoidance, which mostly occurs during the phase right after they’re launch when they’re still being activated and put into their target orbits.

Another key point in the agreement is that SpaceX plan Starlink launches so the they’re at minimum either 5km above or below the highest and lowest points of the International Space Station’s orbit as it makes its way around the Earth. Finally, SpaceX is also expected to share its own analysis of the effectiveness of its satellite dimming techniques, so the agency can adjust its own guidance on the subject accordingly.

The full agreement is embedded below, but the main takeaway is that NASA clearly wants SpaceX to be a better low-Earth partner and citizen as the size of its constellation pushes past the 1,200 mark, on track to grow to around 1,500 or more by year’s end. Also, NASA’s putting a lot of trust and responsibility in SpaceX’s hands – basically it’s laying out that Starlink’s built-in autonomous capabilities can avoid any really danger that might arise. The way NASA has structured this document also leaves open the possibility that it could repurpose it for other constellation operators – a growing need given the number of companies working on networks of low-Earth orbit spacecraft.

OpenSea has been one of a handful of NFT marketplaces to explode in popularity in recent weeks as collectors wade into the trading of non-fungible tokens on the blockchain. While new startups have been popping up everyday, platforms that launched in crypto’s earlier times are receiving rampant attention from investors who see this wave of excitement for cryptocurrencies and tokens as much different than the ones that preceded it.

Today, the startup announced that it’s closed a $23 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a laundry list of angels and firms including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Dylan Field and Linda Xie.

OpenSea launched back in 2017, announcing a $2 million round a few months later from Founders Fund and a few crypto-centric firms. At the time CryptoKitties mania was most of what Ethereum had to offer and early NFT projects were being slowly embraced by a community that was enthusiastic but more curious than anything.

Fast forward to 2021 and NFTs are certainly having a moment, and while the specific shades of that moment may be heavily focused on high-dollar artwork sales from traditional auction houses or NFT memes being tweeted out by Elon Musk, proponents see a future for the tokens that upends the economics of content creation and influence on the internet. The enthusiasm accompanies a months-long rally in the value of cryptocurrencies themselves which have taken Ethereum and Bitcoin to multiples of previous-all-time-highs.

The market for digital goods expanding widely may depend heavily on further adoption among gaming giants and larger media organizations, but early-on there’s hope that digital-first creators can use these marketplace to connect more directly with fans and begin to bypass the massive platforms they depend on now.

There are still some early hiccups as the tech develops. While Ethereum has committed to moving from its energy-intensive proof-of-work standard to a more efficient proof-of-stake one eventually, the existing structure has been far from efficient, which has opened many of the early NFT artists to criticism surrounding climate change concerns and whether the stakeholders in crypto tokens should be prioritizing environmental worries over the specific challenges of certain proofs. In February, OpenSea announced support for more efficient Tezos-based NFTs.

A more nebulous challenge for marketplaces like OpenSea may be cutting through the noise of speculation and providing a marketplace for more users that are actually buying to own, an especially difficult proposition given the breakneck pace of growth for the digital currencies being used to purchase the digital goods themselves.

Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon, Cox Automotive and T. Rowe Price, plans to building out a network of more than 10,000 chargers by the end of 2023 in a network aimed at quickly powering its electric vehicle models on highways and at further afield locations next to hiking and mountain biking trailheads and other adventurous destinations.

The company said Thursday that its so-called Rivian Adventure Network will include more than 3,500 DC fast chargers at over 600 sites, which will only be accessible to owners of its electric vehicles. Each site will have multiple chargers and located on highways and main roads, often by cafes and shops, the company said in a blog post Thursday.

Rivian is also installing thousands of “waypoint” Level 2 AC chargers throughout the United States and Canada. These waypoint chargers will have a 11.5 kW charging speed, which should be able add up to 25 miles of range every hour for its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. The waypoint chargers will be strategically located along and near routes that Rivian customers are likely to take. They will be found at shopping centers restaurants, hotels, campsites and parks. The first of these waypoints, which will be open to the public and accessible to all electric vehicle brands with a J1772 plug, are being installed at all 42 Colorado State Parks. Each park will have two Rivian Waypoints each, with installation starting in July, the company said.

The decision to add this second layer of electric vehicle chargers is a direct appeal to Rivian’s customer base and one required to build confidence in the brand and electric vehicles, in general, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch late last year during a wide-ranging interview about charging, batteries and automated driving.

As part of its announcement, Rivian shared an image of a map indicating where these chargers are located. The map is not yet interactive, making it difficult to provide exact locations, but it appears that there are waypoint, or Level 2, chargers located at the South Rim and North Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park, as well as Zion National Park in Utah.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Rivian

Rivian owners will be able to locate the waypoints as well as its branded fast chargers through the vehicle’s navigation and the accompanying app. Drivers will also be able to use the app or in-car system to and monitor charge status.

The company indicated that the entire charging network will be powered by 100% renewable energy. That doesn’t mean that there will be a solar panel and energy storage system at every site, however. The 100% renewable energy goal will be achieved through partnerships with electricity providers. Rivian said it will use wind and solar wherever possible along with Renewable Energy Certificates to offset other power sources.

Building out such a large network will require capital, which Rivian hasn’t had trouble accessing. Rivian announced in January that it had raised $2.65 billion in a round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Fidelity Management and Research Company, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners as well as several other existing and new investors also participated, which pushed Rivian’s valuation to $27.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the investment round.

Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.

We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a curated experience available to only 50 early-stage startups who exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021. All exhibiting startups are eligible, and the TechCrunch team will ultimately select which companies earn a spot. What’s in store for the Startup Alley+ cohort? So glad you asked.

Let’s get the money issue out of the way. You won’t pay anything beyond what you paid for your Startup Alley Pass. Sweet! Now get ready because Startup Alley+ provides plenty of opportunities for exposure and business growth — before Disrupt 2021 even begins.

Get set up for success with access to founder masterclasses. Warm up your pitching arm because you’ll take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live and receive invaluable feedback. What’s more, TechCrunch will introduce you to top investors within the startup community through our inaugural VC match-making program . A warm introduction beats a cold pitch any day, amirite?

And the perks just keep coming. Startup Alley+ gives participants a healthy headstart on their Disrupt experience. How healthy? It begins in July at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, a virtual event the Startup Alley+ cohort attends for free.

With all those experiences under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the virtual ground running — and reap the rewards — when you set up shop in the Alley at Disrupt.

Don’t forget about the many benefits available to all Startup Alley exhibitors. The virtual nature of Disrupt means thousands of people from around the globe will attend — influencers of every stripe including tech icons, leading founders, top investors, engineers, job seeking talent, and entrepreneurs.

We’ve created more ways to add value and to draw attention to Startup Alley. For instance, every exhibiting startup gets to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of those Disrupt attendees we mentioned earlier.

We’re also rolling out the Startup Alley Crawl experience again. Every tech category will have an hour-long crawl posted in the agenda. Team TechCrunch will go live from the Disrupt Stage and interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from each category. This could be you.

As a Startup Alley participant, you might just be selected to be a Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.

Grab every advantage. Don’t miss your chance to participate in Startup Alley+, which kicks off in July. Apply for your Startup Alley Pass now and get ready to make the most of your time at in September at Disrupt 2021.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

An artificial retina would be an enormous boon to the many people with visual impairments, and the possibility is creeping closer to reality year by year. One of the latest advancements takes a different and very promising approach, using tiny dots that convert light to electricity, and virtual reality has helped show that it could be a viable path forward.

These photovoltaic retinal prostheses come from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where Diego Ghezzi has been working on the idea for several years now.

Early retinal prosthetics were created decades ago, and the basic idea is as follows. A camera outside the body (on a pair of glasses, for instance) sends a signal over a wire to a tiny microelectrode array, which consists of many tiny electrodes that pierce the non-functioning retinal surface and stimulate the working cells directly.

The problems with this are mainly that powering and sending data to the array requires a wire running from outside the eye in — generally speaking a “don’t” when it comes to prosthetics, and the body in general. The array itself is also limited in the number of electrodes it can have by the size of each, meaning for many years the effective resolution in the best case scenario was on the order of a few dozen or hundred “pixels.” (The concept doesn’t translate directly because of the way the visual system works.)

Ghezzi’s approach obviates both these problems with the use of photovoltaic materials, which turn light into an electric current. It’s not so different from what happens in a digital camera, except instead of recording the charge as in image, it sends the current into the retina like the powered electrodes did. There’s no need for a wire to relay power or data to the implant, because both are provided by the light shining on it.

Image Credits: Alain Herzog / EPFL

In the case of the EPFL prosthesis, there are thousands of tiny photovoltaic dots, which would in theory be illuminated by a device outside the eye sending light in according to what it detects from a camera. Of course, it’s still an incredibly difficult thing to engineer. The other part of the setup would be a pair of glasses or goggles that both capture an image and project it through the eye onto the implant.

We first heard of this approach back in 2018, and things have changed somewhat since then, as a new paper documents.

“We increased the number of pixels from about 2,300 to 10,500,” explained Ghezzi in an email to TechCrunch. “So now it is difficult to see them individually and they look like a continuous film.”

Of course when those dots are pressed right up against the retina it’s a different story. After all, that’s only 100×100 pixels or so if it were a square — not exactly high definition. But the idea isn’t to replicate human vision, which may be an impossible task to begin with, let alone realistic for anyone’s first shot.

“Technically it is possible to make pixel smaller and denser,” Ghezzi explained. “The problem is that the current generated decreases with the pixel area.”

Current decreases with pixel size, and pixel size isn’t exactly large to begin with.Image Credits: Ghezzi et al

So the more you add, the tougher it is to make it work, and there’s also the risk (which they tested) that two adjacent dots will stimulate the same network in the retina. But too few and the image created may not be intelligible to the user. 10,500 sounds like a lot, and it may be enough — but the simple fact is that there’s no data to support that. To start on that the team turned to what may seem like an unlikely medium: VR.

Because the team can’t exactly do a “test” installation of an experimental retinal implant on people to see if it works, they needed another way to tell whether the dimensions and resolution of the device would be sufficient for certain everyday tasks like recognizing objects and letters.

Image Credits: Jacob Thomas Thorn et al

To do this, they put people in VR environments that were dark except for little simulated “phosphors,” the pinpricks of light they expect to create by stimulating the retina via the implant; Ghezzi likened what people would see to a constellation of bright, shifting stars. They varied the number of phosphors, the area they appear over, and the length of their illumination or “tail” when the image shifted, asking participants how well they could perceive things like a word or scene.

Image Credits: Jacob Thomas Thorn et al

Their primary finding was that the most important factor was visual angle — the overall size of the area where the image appears. Even a clear image is difficult to understand if it only takes up the very center of your vision, so even if overall clarity suffers it’s better to have a wide field of vision. The robust analysis of the visual system in the brain intuits things like edges and motion even from sparse inputs.

This demonstration showed that the implant’s parameters are theoretically sound and the team can start working towards human trials. That’s not something that can happen in a hurry, and while this approach is very promising compared with earlier, wired ones, it will still be several years even in the best case scenario before it’s possible it could be made widely available. Still, the very prospect of a working retinal implant of this type is an exciting one and we’ll be following it closely.

Google this week announced its was cutting the commissions it charges Android app developers who publish on its Google Play marketplace, following a similar move by Apple last year aimed at fending off antitrust claims. According to Google’s own estimates, 99% of its developers who sell goods and services would see their fees cut in half, as a result of the move which reduces the 30% commission to 15% on the first million dollars a developer earns. Now, data shared by App Annie helps to further illustrate the distribution of earnings on the Google Play Store, as well as how that compares with Apple’s counterpart.

According to App Annie, the vast majority (97.9%) of Google Play publishers made less than $1 million in annual consumer spend in 2020, which allows them to qualify for this reduced commission. But it’s worth noting that the way Google has implemented its new policy is different from Apple, as it will reduce the commission on the “first” $1 million in revenue made during the year — not make $1 million the threshold that triggers a commission increase, like Apple is doing. That means more developers could benefit from Google’s policy change.

It’s interesting to see how few developers across Google Play will ever have to worry about the higher commission bracket. The majority are seeing very small returns from their paid downloads, in-app purchases or subscription offering, the data indicates. This has been an ongoing trend for Android apps, in fact, reflecting Android’s traction in emerging markets where consumers don’t often spend on apps, which has forced many developers to lean on ads in addition to in-app purchases to generate revenues.

Image Credits: App Annie

According to App Annie, 85,381 Google Play developers in 2020 generated less than $100,000 in consumer spend. 3,404 generated $100,000 to $500,000.

Only 568 developers began to even near the $1 million figure, with consumer spend of $500,000 to $750,000 in 2020. Then there were just 359 developers making $750,000 up to that first million.

The groups that would actually see the 30% commission apply to some of their sales were very small.

Just 215 developers saw consumer spend of $1 million to $1.25 million. Only 512 developers made between $1.25 million and $2 million. And then there’s the most profitable group, where 1,308 developers made over $2 million in revenue in 2020.

This distribution pattern where the largest group of developers is making under $100,000 and a sliver of the market was pulling in larger figures, including the over $2 million bracket, was similar to Apple’s App Store in 2020. But in Apple’s case, it sees more developers earning a decent income in the other sub-$1 million brackets than Google Play does.

The reason why Apple may have decided to charge a higher commission for developers making over $1 million is also reflected in these charts. Apple simply has more developers who qualify by making over $1 million per year. (On iOS, 3,611 developers make $1 million or more on the App Store vs. 2,035 developers on Google Play).

Image Credits: App Annie

In other words, these policy changes help a large majority of mobile app developers by allowing them to take home more money, and they give Apple and Google a good way to demonstrate to regulators that they’re not wielding their market power against the “little guy.”

For example, App Annie says that publishers making up to $1 million in consumer spend only comprised 5% of total Google Play consumer spend in 2020, even though 94% of Google Play apps offer some sort of in-app purchase mechanism.

But ultimately, the new policies have far less impact on the revenue the platforms themselves are pulling in via commissions. However, Google’s rule makes it simpler and more fair for developers who are still trying to grow their businesses despite crossing the $1 million threshold.