What a surprise. If I tell people going to the store that they choose to pay for the products, or not, a lot of people will choose not to. Who would guess that people like free stuff? Apple is disrupting whole economy for apps. It’s a very broken economy, with lots of questionable practices, that’s for sure. But we’ll see if it’ll be net benefit for customers. For sure for Apple, as more apps will have to move to be…
At the end of the day, nothing is free. It's just a different payment scheme and Apple is killing that scheme. We don't even pay through our privacy or attention span. These are simply wasted in the process of offloading the payment to a different payment processor. The game is not free, it just collects the payments through the candy shop. The offsetting of the payment includes you stop playing and looking at candy…
In general, neither Google nor FB take a "cut" in the traditional sense from their advertising. What (normally) happens is that advertiser bids their "true value" (i.e expected LTV), and a second price auction is run. In this kind of auction, the winner pays the price that the runner-up was willing to spend.
This differs massively from the pre-internet ad business (radio, tv, print etc), in that they would normally quote $X, but up to $X/10 was the minimum price, but the rest was built in as margin for people further up the chain (sales, agency etc).
One of the big problems that the ad agencies are having now is that their business model relied on arbitraging the price of the client vs the cost of the service, and this doesn't work for Google or Facebook.
That being said, both Goog and FB make insane amounts of money, but that's because the ads are essentially free to deliver (in fact, the users pay to render the ads themselves), and they have huge amounts of users to serve ads to.