Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
There have been plenty of documented examples of people who have put digital products on the internet, and solicited donations after the fact... and received effectively nothing for their product. People took the free money, and walked away. Human nature at work.
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I used to be a "shareware" author, and a member of a trade association called the ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals). There was great debate at the time about whether, in order to sell shareware software, you had to have "incentives" to do so ("nag screens", etc) or whether you could simply rely on people's honesty to pay for the software if they found it useful.
A British shareware author did an experiment to try to settle the matter. He released a disk utility which was either fully functional, or which displayed "nag screens" and had various other registration "incentives", depending on whether the PC's hard disk serial number was odd or even - ie, a completely random 50:50 probability. The program automatically included on the registration form a code which indicated which state it was in for that user.
The results: he had 7 times
more registrations from the version that "nagged" than from the version which didn't.
That is, I think, proof positive of the not terribly surprising fact that most people will take "something for nothing" if they are able to do so.