{"id":11465,"date":"2015-06-12T09:50:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T13:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=11465"},"modified":"2015-06-12T09:50:48","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T13:50:48","slug":"freemium-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/12\/freemium-is-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Freemium Is Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@shuveb\/how-i-killed-app-sales-by-going-freemium-31c04c60d2f2\">Shuveb Hussain<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@shuveb\/how-i-killed-app-sales-by-going-freemium-31c04c60d2f2\"><p>Amazingly, people were finding Comfy Read solely via the App Store search without me having to do anything. I cannot overstate its importance.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>With Apple making analytics available on iTunes Connect, I was amazed to see that Comfy Read was having conversion rates of anywhere between 6 and 9%. Pretty amazing for an up-front paid app, I thought.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Will v2.0, the freemium app that a lot more users are downloading beat v1.0, the older version, financially? Not by a long shot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marco.org\/2015\/06\/07\/freemium-is-hard\">Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.marco.org\/2015\/06\/07\/freemium-is-hard\">\n<p>Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don&rsquo;t have a good place for it.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>I spent months debating which features should be behind Overcast&rsquo;s in-app purchase. If I limited the number of subscribed podcasts for free users, I&rsquo;d be discouraging people from trying new podcasts. If I put Smart Speed, Voice Boost, and my smart playlists completely behind the paywall, most users would never experience my best features and wouldn&rsquo;t think my app was very good. But if I kept the paywall too easy to avoid, like showing ads with a purchase to remove them, it wouldn&rsquo;t sell well. (No-ads upgrades never sell well, by the way.) And whatever features I limited would be free in many competing apps, including the one Apple includes on every iPhone for free.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shuveb Hussain: Amazingly, people were finding Comfy Read solely via the App Store search without me having to do anything. I cannot overstate its importance. [&#8230;] With Apple making analytics available on iTunes Connect, I was amazed to see that Comfy Read was having conversion rates of anywhere between 6 and 9%. Pretty amazing for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,101,1219,905,522,31,904,26,165,647],"class_list":["post-11465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-appstore","tag-business","tag-comfy-read","tag-extensions","tag-inapppurchase","tag-ios","tag-ios-8","tag-iosapp","tag-kindle","tag-overcast"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11466,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11465\/revisions\/11466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}