What does "Sponsored Apps" mean?

Actually I didn’t know this. I’m on Facebook only, but I just use it as platform to keep contact to people I haven’t seen for ages. Spending 15 minutes a month. And of course I know that Facebook is using my data to sell. Its okay for me, because I get something in return. It wouldn’t change for me, if they would call advertisment as advertisment, just like it is. Anyways…

If you pay for advertising, you are a sponsor and that entity is being sponsored. If you are paid to advertise, you are being sponsored and that entity is a sponsor. It’s not a matter of the word, but of misallocating the action.

As with Rolf, I’m also Scandinavian, and sponsoring is NOT paying for advertisement space, but rather letting someone have free advertisement space. So I was sure this meant that McNeel was sponsoring the PLUGINS to get more spotlight. And I thought it was a great idea, kind of an “Editors choice”.
Sponsoring is always related to helping someone who can not do what they do with out financial help from others. (At least that’s how it is here, and thus confusing as an international word IF it is differently in other countries)

I am for full transparency and think that McNeel should call this “Paid placement”. Done deal, easy to understand and also shows that the plugin means business. “Sponsored” just raises a lot of questions like what are they sponsoring? McNeel who is in need of help? Is it keeping the zoo up and running? Will McNeel close it down if it can’t generate revenue on it’s own? Etc.

So just labeling it “Advertisement” or “Paid position” would give a clear indication about what this is IMO, and I don’t think anybody would lift an eyebrow on to why McNeel earns some extra money on this. By all means, with out funding, no development, and we are all for development :slight_smile:

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Sure, but I don’t think the terminology was to hide anything, just happens to be the social lingo being adopted “Sponsored” not “Sponsoring” however confusing it may be. For me it seemed normal and knew what it meant because I am used to the way the social media platforms use the word.


Note, the word ad is in the descriptions :smiley: confusing world.

We get dizzy because we eat their marketing.

I agree “sponsored” might be confusing, but again, we are using the terminology we’ve seen in all major websites (google, fb, instagram…). “paid apps” didn’t sound good to us, as it could be interpreted as apps that have a fee. “featured apps” was also confusing, as it sounded as apps we want to promote as McNeel (editor’s choice), when the case is that they are there because the developer pays a fee…

As for food4Rhino not being a full marketplace, this was the original idea, but there were many issues that don’t depend on us, so we couldn’t have (or didn’t want) the control there, and at the end, if someone buys a software from us, they will want us to be responsible of it in many aspects: quality, support, tutorials, training… Plus all the transactions we would need to do between the developer and us, and us and the customer. This is why now on food4Rhino you can mark your plug-in as commercial, then use your own system to sell it (you can also use fastspring or similar sell services).

The aspects we cannot control or standardize:

  • perpetual vs susbcription licensing
  • quality of the product, service releases
  • upgrade policy
  • support, tutorials
  • volume discount
  • fix vs floating licenses
  • compatibility with Win, Mac, GH
  • refunds
  • educational licenses (and what are the terms here, as some companies limit the use of these)
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Indeed I agree with you👍

And yes, Grasshopper, food4Rhino and many other products and services by McNeel are free, or included in the price of Rhino. This doesn’t mean that these don’t have a cost for us. Of course we develop them to fill our customers needs and have a greater product (that will sell better), but we like to be efficient and reduce our operative costs, so if through some banners and sponsored apps we can support a part of the infrastructure, and at the same time give the opportunity to some developers to have extra advertisement (they ask for that), then we think it’s in the benefit of all of us.

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Again, you can already mark your apps or resources on food4Rhino as “commercial” and sell these.

I understand that the chosen word was not to make a smoke screen, but it doesn’t lift the fog either :slight_smile:
Google, Instagram and Facebook is mainly free to the public and needs income, or there would not be a facebook arena to play in for free, so they need sponsors (or to sell your data, since you are the product, but that’s a different story…) in many ways it’s like a footballmatch, they need more income than what tickets alone provide, so a truck company TOTALLY unrelated to football can buy billboard space to show off their name, and if they pay extra they will even be labeled sponsor of the match, (It they pay more than what the billboard is worth) , so they are one of the reasons why the football match can take place. Same goes for tv-shows, but that’s not the situation here. Nobody is sponsoring anything, no one unrelated to the list is paying to show their name there (no truck company), they are paying to be on top of the list, it’s that frank, that simple and that fair and I think nobody is against it. Thus to me “paid position” is the best wording for it, toss in a hyperlink and let people read up if they like :slight_smile: Who knows, maybe other cultures are totally opposite :slight_smile:

Why not? There are services to sell software licenses out there.

Why not? Each plugin is rated and valued by the community. They can have emblems like “stable”, “under construction”, etc. The buyer should only be aware of the conditions of the purchase before buying.

Why is this necessary? You pay for the product as it is. You just have to make the payer aware.

You offer to sell the licenses you want and whoever does not accept it should sell them on their own.

Yes, a person has to validate if the criteria are met, but it won’t happen so often that this will cause you to lose money.

You are losing money by not including a real marketplace within the application (not only on the web) because anyone is going to pay 1 euro for a definition that saves you 2 hours of work.

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I’m not saying it’s not possible, but if there’s no uniform way, it makes it a pain to manage, or what it’s the same, it’s not worth for all the resources and people we should put there, when we better invest in development.

And people would expect that any product available on food4Rhino has exactly the same conditions.

Also we are not Apple. Making an invoice of 1€ is probably for us more expensive than 1€.

It cannot be that you reject a business model because your approach makes it inoperative, rather than making the approach fit the market. It’s like you don’t want to invest in anything other than digging code, and that bothers me because it’s like bending over and letting the world move on its own, rather than being a meaningful participant.

It’s not the 1990s, you can delegate all the services and survey your users to see if the more vague approach is feasible. Your value here is your centralized position, the intermediary that links supply and demand. And I’m sure you’ve already studied something, but if the arguments against it are: “this whole list of things it must have it is not operational”, instead of just consider the minimum viable product, is not well focused. If the MVP works, that’s when it makes sense to try to validate additional features in the market.

I needed to say it, sorry, It’s something that bothers me. I hope one day you will open the door to the micro-markets around GH, instead of settling on having a generous community, encourage it. Thanks for the talk.

You can make the transactions with tokens or some fictitious currency and carry out the invoices when it is profitable. A little creativity please!

Generally in favour of this myself, but you would be amazed how many patents there are for anything to do with the movement of money online. Developing something new in this market segment requires millions of venture capital dollars to pay teams of lawyers.

I don’t mean to create a virtual currency like a cryptomoney. I’m talking about gamifying the development of others. Just like video games, you don’t use the money to buy skins or stuff, you buy gems or other crap and with those gems you buy the skins. As Twitch does with the bits.

Hi Dani,

Well, selling 3rd party apps is not our core business. Of course we want to have an ecosystem, and help our partners be succesful. We’ve always tried to do that, even before food4Rhino existed. But selling products that are not developed by McNeel has a whole series of considerations for us, not only operational, also to deliver the same quality our customers might expect, and that’s beyond the product’s technical performance, it’s the entire experience, including support.

at the end you need to convert tokens or whatever other things you use as a currency, into a real currency. I don’t see how this would affect positively the system, and all administrative nightmares.

This is true, but so is also the fact that hacking is vastly more advanced today than what it was.
e-onsoftware was brought to it’s knees because of hacking and they never fully got back on their feet. They had a huge catalog of user created content and many small packages they sold, but are now back to only selling core software. (user content is gone and old user accounts deleted) I think it is wise to see how much support and management running a store actually is, and not do that inhouse, but rather outsource it to some core amazon solution or something.

The last thing we want is for McNeel to loose focus on development :slight_smile:

That said, I would love to see an “appstore” in Rhino where micro transactions could take place seamlessly integrated in Rhino with a downloadmanager hoocked up to the user account for easy transfer to new systems, where your login handled what licenses could be used. (So if user A had 200 plugins installed, then user B would only be able to use those who he also has) But that is no small task to build AND maintain.