Motricity increases its share from direct software sales

[Colin Dunstan]

This I found tonight at MSMobiles: Motricity (PalmGear, PocketGear, Smartphone.net) has decided to increase its share of revenue from software sold on their sites by 10% (and is now on par with Handango):

The new Motricity reseller agreement reflects the following, in effect June 1, 2005

• A rate of 60% payable to developers on Motricity direct sites, and 50% on Motricity partner sites, not including shared transaction costs. Please note: the transaction costs calculation is not changing and will be deducted from the sales price prior to the developer royalty calculation.
• IRS rules for tax withholding for non-US residents
• Real-time fulfillment definition
• Change in revenue share for products which do not utilize Real-time fulfillment methods
• An effective date of June 1, 2005

The discussion on price policies of electronic sales distributors such as PalmGear isn't new. You can browse an older discussion here.

[Bob Russell]

That's an awfully high take for Motricity. But they are providing a good service. Still...

[hacker]

Funny you should mention this... I'm working with quite a few pissed-off developers who list their applications on Motrocity (which my mind keeps wanting to say Atrocity), and I'm putting together a set of requirements to replace what these services provide, in full, but add a ton of additional features (which I won't go into here).

Basically do it right, without a profit motive, and give the developers 80%-90% of their revenue.

The other piece of this change from Motrocity that isn't made public, is that they've also clamped down on how developers can list their applications on their partner sites.

They're also asking developers to remove all mention of their own sites, their own support, and their other products. This gives the developers no way to track customers for upgrades.

They're also asking developers to provide a plain vanilla version of their application, minus any branding and customer service so that there's no way that the developers can have any further contact with, nor revenue from, the customer. This means that the customer has absolutely no idea who the developer is, or how to contact them, or how to find the developer's homepage to purchase other applications from them.

(Of course you could use the PGHQ search engine, but that is such a broken piece of garbage anyway, who would want to? It returns completely invalid, non-relevant results, and fails to return proper results for very specific keywords only found in specific application descriptions. Sounds very shady and "weighted" to their higher-paying partners to me).

Its out of control, and I'm spearheading the project to completely obviate Motrocity and their partners. Period.

Originally Posted by BobR

That's an awfully high take for Motricity. But they are providing a good service.

The sad thing is that exactly that is what the customers think. Motricity takes care of their customers a lot, but don't care even minimally about the developers.

A few guys with which I work are trying to make a "developer movement" in which they will invite everyone to disable their products from PalmGear for one week starting June 1 (which is the day when the new policy takes effect). If the big guys like Astraware or Handmark could join us, that would be great!

By the way, there is a website where everyone can read the atrocities made by PalmGear and similar sites. It's www.esd-union.com (Note: I have no affiliation with ESD Union. I just think it's important for everyone to read it.)