Oh no, another thread about piracy

[mr ploppy]

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

This is for a game, so the demographic will be different. They basically let consumers decide how much they wanted to pay for it, with a minimum price of one penny.

So far it has been downloaded 80,000 times, and generated $683,000 which gives an average of about $8.50 per download. But 25% of the downloads were unauthorised, and came from links posted on pirate sites, so the real average payment would be much higher.

The 25% who wouldn't even pay one penny for it suggests that their piracy is not financially motivated. The blog post gives a few suggestions for what their motivation might be, and they all seem reasonable enough to me.

Though the obvious one seems to be missing -- most people downloading it for free won't know that they could have bought it legally so cheaply.

[Hamlet53]

I can think of at least one thing that would continue to drive piracy, even when the person in question is aware that it can be purchased for as little as one cent. Any legitimate purchase requires steps—filling out a form, providing a credit card number or other payment information—that pirating a copy does not. To someone who sees no difference between pirating a copy and purchasing a legitimate copy pirating still looks better.

[Penforhire]

That is the "laziness" reason the article does mention. I like Ploppy's thought that some pirates don't know the bundle was available for $0.01. I did at least pay more that that for it myself (great bundle of indie games)

[Worldwalker]

I think this is where the advantages of payment services like PayPal come in. I've passed up buying things now and then (including ebooks) because I wasn't that interested -- not enough to fill out a form, go dig my credit card out of my wallet, and spend five or ten minutes navigating their checkout system. If I had seen a "pay with PayPal" button I'd probably have bought it. I'm no fan of PayPal -- I've been through hell with them a couple of times -- but right now, they're the biggest enabler of impulse buys on the Web.

People are slackers. That's one of the fundamental rules of business: your customer is a slacker. Your customer is a slacker, and will pay you for things that enable him to slack.

Look at our ebooks: what are the reasons we like them? We don't have to go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore and bring them home. We don't have to carry backpacks (or pull little red wagons) to take our books wherever we go. We don't have to maintain physical libraries, with all the shelving, organization, even dusting, they require. We don't have to scour used bookstores for rare and out-of-print books (I still don't have the whole original Tom Swift series on my shelves, but I have them on my 505). We don't have to put in more hours at work (or give up other things) to get books, at least those of us who share my taste for the contents of Project Gutenberg. Yeah, the cold truth is that we love our ebooks and our devices because they facilitate slacking.

So the way to make money is to 1) sell a product which appeals to the buyer's desire to slack, and b) sell it in a way that provides a least-effort path to give you money. If you're going to make people jump through hoops to pay you a penny, they'll be reluctant to pay you at all. Make it easy for us slackers!