Comments on: Everyone who sells software should have this information

by: Michael

Sun, 15 May 2005 09:55:16 +0000

I would guess that the truly most important data for making any sort of business decisions in the field is the market size and segmentation for various products out there. Let’s say how many people out there buying shareware? For my personal interests, let’s say, how many developers buy shareware developer tools, like ide’s etc. What is the relationship between price and sales.

Some of these issues are cursorily addressed, by Joel Spolsky or by Eric Sinc, but I never found any actual hard data. There seems to be a lot of pontification and wise advice out there, but no hard numbers.

by: Dan Housman

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:56:04 +0000

I was interested in the idea of some benchmark shareware stats. The most interesting question to me is the function of downloads->license sale conversion to determine the right function for conversions. It also would be great to understand the conversions with regards to price, sector (I’m mainly interested in business utilities/information management applications like RSS readers.)

It is the missing set of numbers for figuring out the whole business model including advertising, distribution partnerships, etc.

My current stats are 8/1000 downloads at a $50 license price but that could be too low, normal, crazy, etc.?

Does anyone know where I can find that sort of content drop me a line at dan@danhousman.com.

Thanks…

by: Dustin Sacks

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 00:32:27 +0000

On my Macintosh all the words in the PDF are displayed as boxes. You use a strange font or something?

by: Brian

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 13:31:52 +0000

The per hour stats are based on GMT -6 hours which is the Central time zone in the U.S. I’ve updated the pdf accordingly.

by: Michael

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:38:15 +0000

Nothing interesting. It’s obvious that downloads/purchases lower over the weekend. And time distribution is obvious as well. So what kind of new and helpful data this report brings?

by: Rob

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 04:02:00 +0000

Thanks Brian for the info.

The eSellerate data is interesting, but ultimately how can it be used to your advantage? Apart from the interest factor, can anyone see the advantage of knowing that most purchases are made over lunchtime? (presumably lunchtime in the eSellerate time zone; some of us might be asleep at that time

by: ssp

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 20:44:49 +0000

Interesting.

I do wonder, though, what the ‘per hour’ data tell us, seeing that downloads come from all around the world. (And it’s unclear which time zone your data live in.)