Thank you for the response regarding the Android app confusion in recent days.
Although you have begun to explain your strategy for Tapatalk, you are a long way from fully explaining your plans and the roadmap for the future.
For years Tapatalk has been a purchasable app, and now you are suddenly giving a version away for free to users. The other version you have stated above just has a built-in photo editor and tablet support. What you haven't mentioned here is the watermarking when using Tapatalk image hosting (which I believe is removed for the Pro version?) nor have you mentioned adverts. It does make me wonder if there is anything else you're not telling us.
Regarding the adverts, it seems to me as though your plan is to display adverts on the free version of Tapatalk (I mean, you've got to make some money from the app, you aren't giving it away out of the goodness of your hearts?!). What is unclear is whether Pro users will also see these adverts and whether or not forum owners have any control as to whether or not any of their users will see adverts or not. You have stated elsewhere that forum owners can choose to opt-out of displaying adverts. However, you deleted two threads where forum owners raised their concerns about this and now you're claiming that they were deleted because they were in the wrong place (which seems a strange thing to do when you can simply
move the threads to the correct place instead). You've now conveniently put up a guide showing forum owners how they can switch off these adverts and state that they will remain switched off unless we choose to switch them on. However, in recent weeks when you began testing the adverts, you did switch on these adverts in our forum panels without our consent (and several forum owners will attest to this).
Also in recent times you changed the say that Link Affiliation worked for forum owners. Previously owners linked their Viglink accounts in Tapatalk. Suddenly that disappeared and we had to register our PayPal email address in the forum owner area instead, yet there was no announcement about this. Why the change? The stats lack any detail and I suspect you made this change so you could skim off some revenue from this link affiliation.
In all, there are an increasing number of forum owners and Tapatalk users who have grown suspicious of your business practices, which seem to put profit first and users and forum owners second.
I would advise you to give a much clearer explanation to both users and forum owners about your plans for the future and you may want to do this in two separate threads. You have many questions that need answering:
Explanation to users:
- What are all of the features of the free app? (including any advertising, watermarking etc)
- What are the features of the Pro app? (including any advertising, watermarking etc)
Explanation to forum owners:
Advertising
- Can a forum owner completely disable adverts for all their forum members?
- If adverts are enabled, who sees them? Free app only or both free and pro apps?
- Can a forum owner prevent certain types of adverts being displayed (just like you can with Google Adsense)?
- Will better stats for this be provided (we get far better stats on Google Adsense)?
Link Affiliation
- Why did you change the process for link affiliation?
- What percentage of income from link affiliation are you taking and what do forum owners get?
- Will you be making it clearer in the forum owners section about adding a PayPal email address when switching on link affiliation (as it is not clear).
- Will better stats be provided? The current stats are very poor compared to the detail we get from Viglink.
I, along with other users and forum owners look forward to hearing your answers on
all of these questions.