14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has recently made a series of modifications to the Digital River Vendor Agreement and to the RIM Vendor Agreement. Among these changes is the fact that Blackberry application developers will receive only 70 percent of the revenue from now on, down 10 percent from the previous 80 percent revenue they were allowed to keep.
According to the BlackBerry maker, the change is meant to “support the expansion into new markets and to allow for the additional billing models.” These new billing models RIM makes reference of include credit card and carrier billing support: “We are now taking the first step to introduce credit card and carrier billing support for BlackBerry App World, as announced at the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference.”
The company reportedly sent out notice to all BlackBerry developers with applications in the App World, so as to inform them on the changes. The letter sent to developers, which was brought to light by BlackBerry Cool, also notes that the new agreements are to be posted in the Vendor Portal (which has been recently updated to BlackBerry App World Vendor Portal 2.0).
“We are also introducing Bango as the Merchant of Record for carrier billed transactions. If you are distributing paid applications, you will soon be presented with the Bango Vendor Agreement, for acceptance, when logging into the Vendor Portal. Our goal is to ensure that BlackBerry App World provides developers with unique opportunities to successfully monetize applications created on the BlackBerry application platform. We hope that you are as excited as we are about these new billing models,” the email reads.
Changing the revenue cut for BlackBerry developers from 80 percent to 70 percent might not seem too much of a deal, especially since other app portals offer the same revenue sharing percentage, but it will certainly make building of apps for RIM's OS seem a less appealing action than before. However, it still remains to be seen how this will affect end users, as price increases for applications are expected.