When starting a microISV, many people do marketing the old fashioned way. Trial and error. With that in mind, I thought that many of you would be interested in knowing some statistics on things like “which day is best for downloads” or “on what day are most shareware purchases made”. Hint… its not the same day.
Well now you can know! eSellerate, a leading software commerce provider, has graciously supplied microISV with data gathered over the last six months of 2004. I have compiled this information into charts that I think will be very useful when tailoring marketing campaigns for your software.
The following charts are provided in the pdf:
- microISV poll - Who is your target market?
- microISV poll - What type of trial do you offer?
- microISV poll - When did you last purchase a shareware application?
- Downloads by hour of the day
- Downloads by day of the week
- Purchases by hour of the day
- Purchases by day of the week
Download the pdf, Shareware Statistics from microISV, and feel free to share it with others who may be interested in these statistics. As always, I’m interested in hearing your feedback regarding information such as this so that I can keep the site updated with what is most useful.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 10:44 am and is filed under Marketing, News.
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When starting a microISV, many people do marketing the old fashioned way. Trial and error. With that in mind, I thought that many of you would be interested in knowing some statistics on things like “which day is best for downloads” or “on what day are most shareware purchases made”. Hint… its not the same day.
Well now you can know! eSellerate, a leading software commerce provider, has graciously supplied microISV with data gathered over the last six months of 2004. I have compiled this information into charts that I think will be very useful when tailoring marketing campaigns for your software.
The following charts are provided in the pdf:
- microISV poll - Who is your target market?
- microISV poll - What type of trial do you offer?
- microISV poll - When did you last purchase a shareware application?
- Downloads by hour of the day
- Downloads by day of the week
- Purchases by hour of the day
- Purchases by day of the week
Download the pdf, Shareware Statistics from microISV, and feel free to share it with others who may be interested in these statistics. As always, I’m interested in hearing your feedback regarding information such as this so that I can keep the site updated with what is most useful.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 10:44 am and is filed under Marketing, News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
February 16th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
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.)
February 16th, 2005 at 11:02 pm
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
February 17th, 2005 at 2:38 am
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?
February 17th, 2005 at 8:31 am
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.
February 20th, 2005 at 7:32 pm
On my Macintosh all the words in the PDF are displayed as boxes. You use a strange font or something?
February 22nd, 2005 at 2:56 pm
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…
May 15th, 2005 at 4:55 am
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.