Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I must respectfully disagree, David. I've been in the shareware business since the early 1980s, and it certainly corresponds pretty well with my experiences.
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The 1% conversion rate is just a handy number people like to mention. It's easy to remember, especially now that it's been batted around as if it were fact for 20-25 years. It provides a (hopefully) low bar to clear for new developers, and a "reason why I haven't done better" for those who have had a product out for a while. "No, really, a 1% conversion rate is good. It's the average, you know."
The Ugly Truth is:
There is no meaningful "average".
A huge volume of shareware/independent software is released that sells *nothing*. Just like there are a lot of books that are released that sell *nothing*. A handful (software and books) become like winning lottery tickets. You can't take a meaningful average of *nothing* and "near infinity". Even the median of such a group is less than useful (assuming you have actually accounted for the whole group; those "sold nothing" products and books are much harder to count because nobody ever sees them).
What you can do, though, is use your own numbers as a gauge and see what you can do to improve those. Find the points of failure, the points where your potential customers/readers abandon you, and experiment with ways to remove those problems.
-David
Author of
The Indie Game Development Survival Guide
Developer of
The Journal - Personal Journal Software for Windows, available since 1996