Technology

Seemingly out of the blue, Apple has just announced that its iTunes Affiliate Program will no longer include apps for iOS or macOS. These changes will go live on October 1st, 2018.

The program previously allowed individuals, blogs, YouTubers, etc to link to an app and earn a small cut of the sale if a purchase was made. When the program first launched, affiliates would make 7% of any app purchase (or a little less than 7 cents on a 99 cent app.) In April of last year, they dropped that down to 2.5%. With this news, the commission is gone completely.

The broader iTunes Affiliate Program itself will live on, but only for music, movies, books, and TV purchases.

Herethe full text from Appleown newsletter

Thank you for participating in the affiliate program for apps. With the launch of the new App Store on both iOS and macOS and their increased methods of app discovery, we will be removing apps from the affiliate program. Starting on October 1st, 2018, commissions for iOS and Mac apps and in-app content will be removed from the program. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) remain in the affiliate program.

For more information on commission rates, please see our Commissions and Payments page on the Affiliate Resources site.

If you have questions, please visit our Helpdesk.

This news hits particularly hard for indie review sites like TouchArcade, who rely on affiliate links in their reviews for a substantial chunk of their revenue. In a post on the announcement, TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp writes &I really didn&t think it would be Apple that eventually kills TouchArcade.&

We&ve reached out to Apple for further insight on the change, and will update if we hear back.

In the increasingly crowded world of venture capital, many more firms are producing research as a way to differentiate themselves from the pack. Earlier this year, for example,Wing,a venture firm that focuses primarily on enterprise startups, published a state of the industrial IoT market. The consumer-tech investment firm Goodwater Capitalis becoming known for its occasional equity research report on a still-private company.

Now Illuminate Ventures, a nine-year-old, woman-led, early-stage venture firm thatfocused on enterprise cloud and mobile computing startups, has produced some thought-provoking research of its own around how women and male founders view entrepreneurship, from why they do it to how much support they receive from family members.

First, a little about Illuminatemethodologies. According to firm founder Cindy Padnos, the firm initially reached out to 1,200 tech founders and venture capitalists who Illuminate presented with a litany of questions about entrepreneurship and motivations and challenges that people face in starting companies. In the end, says Padnos, Illuminate had a response rate of just more than 30 percent, or slightly over 400 completed responses, which it used SurveyMonkey tools to collect.

Roughly half the responses came from partner-level VCs at 150 different venture firms; the other half came from U.S.-based founders who raised venture funding in 2017.

So what did they have to say A lot. If we&re being honest, the survey was so wide-ranging as to be a bit overwhelming. (You can check out the full paper here.) In the meantime, some of the most interesting takeaways can be grouped into a couple of different categories. One of these seems to disprove old myths. Among them:

• The belief that entrepreneurs launch companies chiefly for financial gain is seemingly a myth. Only 15 percent of male founders and 2 percent of the female founders who responded to the survey said that money is their primary motivation.
• Respondents — both founders and VCs — also dismissed the idea that a founder needs to have a STEM degree to be a successful tech founder.
• Traditional thinking that women founders are more risk-averse than men or are unable to balance the needs of work and family are also incorrect or, at least, outdated, based on feedback from survey respondents. More than twice the percentage of male founders indicated that &balancing family and work& was a strong barrier to their starting a company (31 percent versus 17 percent of women founders). They also rated the &need for financial security& as a strong barrier in slightly higher numbers (49 percent versus 42 percent of women respondents).
• Itwidely believed that both women and men, especially in todaygo-go markets, start companies largely for the potential financial gain, but money actually has little to do with why either start companies. In fact, women say the top three reasons they start companies, in descending order of importance, is to bring their ideas to market, create a long-lasting business and prove to themselves that they can do it. Men similarly said that bringing their ideas to market is their top motivator, followed by creating a long-lasting business. Men did rate the &significant financial gain& that can come with entrepreneurship third on their list, so itnot entirely a &myth,& even if itgreatly exaggerated.

Interestingly, the survey also showed a real disconnect between how VCs view founders and how founders view themselves. For example:

• Male VCs ranked male founders as likely to be stronger than women in 4 of 10 &success attributes& that were measured. Similarly (and somewhat depressingly), women VCs found only one attribute where they saw women founders as stronger than men, being &smart risk-takers.&
• In large percentages, both male and female VCs saw 15 of 16 potential barriers to entrepreneurial success as more likely to impact women founders than men.
• More than half of VCs said they believe that men are more likely to have attributes like &prior start-up experience& and the &desire to scale a business massively.& But founder responses refuted the notion that they share VCs& thinking on this front.
• Another way that VCs and founders appear to think differently: None of the VCs who participated in the survey selected &gaining the support of family& among the top five barriers to entrepreneurial success, while nearly a quarter of both male and female founders said it was.
• A stat we found to be particularly surprising was the disconnect between how male and femaleVCs view founders who &think big& and have &strategic vision& and how that impacts their odds of achieving their goals. While 40 percent of women VCs said this was a bigger barrier to success when it comes to female founders, just 12 percent of male VCs said the same of female founders. Could it be that women investors think they are more attuned to how women founders are perceived Are they themselves harder on women founders Or are they meeting with more women founders and seeing less ambitious ideas than they&d like In some ways, the stats create more questions than they answer.

Again, you can check out the full study here. It has all kinds of interesting nuggets that could start fresh conversations about whathappening in the startup industry right now.

Hulu taking an interesting approach to adaptation with Castle Rock —instead of basing the series on a specific book by Stephen King, ittelling a new story about (you guessed it) Castle Rock, the fictional town in Maine where many of Kingstories are set.

The series stars André Holland as Henry Deaver, a lawyer with a mysterious disappearance in his past, and Melanie Lynskey as Molly Strand, a real estate agent with psychic powers and a similarly mysterious connection to Henry. The cast also includes veterans of previous King adaptations, including Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and Bill Skarsgård (It).

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we&re joined by Sarah Perez to discuss our reaction to the first few episodes.Ita show that feels more creepy and mysterious than outright terrifying, but there was at least one jump-scare that got us pretty good. Italso a show full of Easter eggs that may delight hardcore King fans— but that didn&t do much for us, since we&re casual fans at best.

We also covered the controversy around Disneyfiring of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and Discoveryplans to launch a streaming service of its own.

You may notice that this is a shorter episode than usual, with a distinct lack of co-host Jordan Crook (until the end). Thatnot intentional. We had to edit around some technical issues, so what we ended up with was more of a highlight reel from a much longer discussion.

Anyway, you can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)