Under the Bridge

So chances are you’ve heard of FreeAppADay.com, where you get to pay them a whack of cash for the privilege of not making any money. Sounds promising, doesn’t it? But, you know, perhaps we are unduly cynical (it has been known to happen) and there is indeed a sound benefit to the exposure gained by this strategy, yes?

Well, as you can read in this iphonesb thread, not so much.

… Before the promotion, sales of Scribattle were pretty low; averaging 
4.5/day the month before the promo. Scribattle Lite, the always-free 
ad-supported version, averaged 432 DLs/day during that same time 
period (this roughly 1% ratio is incredibly regular for this pair of 
apps btw). During the promo period (It was free for most of a week), 
Scribattle jumped to about 75000 DLs/day, while Scribattle Lite stayed 
at normal levels.

Disappointingly, after the promo period ended, sales dropped directly 
back to their normal levels; Scribattle averaged 5 sales/day during 
the 30 days after the promo ended. There is a tiny bump on the day of 
switching back to paid, where just a handful of people probably surfed 
in while it was free, and it changed to paid while they were on the 
page, and they went ahead and bought it anyway. I’m really talking 
tiny, it looks like about 10-12 people, I made $28 that day.

I could be bitter and say I wasted my $600, but I don’t really see it 
that way. If nothing else, it was a learning experience…

No, no, go ahead, be bitter. You’ve earned it.

… And no, my sales spike was just a sharp plateau. Sales dropped off immediately to pre-FAAD-promo levels…

And on behalf of the rest of us, a heartfelt thank you for providing us the learning experience without it costing $600!

There is more mildly worth reading in the thread about possible ways to make this less of a mistake, but really the most important thing we see to take away from it is that free users are not worth a cost to acquire, indeed they are actually a negative to your paid app. This followup was particularly eye-opening:

… A vocal sub-group of them want everything to be both free AND perfect, and if it’s not, they’ll trash it loudly on the nearest available forum (in this case, the app store). In fact, acknowledging this fact, the guy from FAAD actually suggests having a post-FAAD-promo update at the ready, to help push down some of the inevitable trash comments that you’ll get during the free period (since those comments will belong to a previous version, and won’t show up at the top)…

Yikes! OK, we don’t know about you, but it sure seems to us that when a marketing channel has to provide you strategies for damage control of the effects of its use in advance, perhaps using it is a somewhat less than optimal plan, yes?

UPDATE:

Why yes, yes there are counterexamples. Here is a pretty decent one (h/t : @fingerbakery). So there is a certain class of apps to which this promotion avenue may be fairly well suited, we’ll grant the no doubt very nice when they’re not miffed with us @freeappaday people, sure. But we stand by the important point that free users aren’t worth acquiring if you have anything other than a support-free little diversion of an app.