Perhaps the free app might've converted better if Marco had added an in-app purchase to upgrade to the full version.
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
31–40 of 117 posts
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#32These days I really prefer to pay a service or an app, hopefully to give it some sustainable fuel, rather than invest in a free tool that doesn't allow the author to pay its bills.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#33I think Readitlater (and lately Readability) strips down the content much better than Instapaper. Instapaper always has a lot of weird extraneous stuff around the text. The others do not. +1 for them.
I've been using Instapaper (mostly on programming related blog posts [standard WP/Blogger templates] and major magazine articles [Vanity Fair, Economist, etc]) for a while and rarely found this to be the case. It has almost always stripped unneeded markup well, often providing a superior reading experience on the iPhone than iOS Safari's rendering of the original content. Are there any specific sites/types of pages y…
My only real complaint about Instapaper is that it often seems to strip out the byline, and sometimes even the name of the publication, leaving me without some of the context I like to have when reading an article. (Here's an example of missing byline: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bookrags.c... (the article is written by Zadie Smith, which I find to be very important information.))
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#34I totally get Marco's decision to go with a paid version of his app. Of course, he doesn't provide an option for publishers to opt out of providing free versions of their content, which is what they're doing when Instapaper strips all the ads off of them.
He actually does:
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#35"Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging a lot for an iPhone app from the start." AND there was a free version out. He's neglecting the "critical mass" factor. The free version helped him sell the full version until it reached that "critical mass" that was required for the popularity of the full version to continue to drive sales of itself.…
> He's neglecting the "critical mass" factor.
See the "Every app is a special case" section.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#36I second, third, and fourth the notion about pathological customers. iOS is practically training a generation of them. I'm glad they are far away from me.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#37I totally get Marco's decision to go with a paid version of his app. Of course, he doesn't provide an option for publishers to opt out of providing free versions of their content, which is what they're doing when Instapaper strips all the ads off of them.
That's not entirely true. Whatever article I am reading in instapaper is an article I have visited in a normal webbrowser first, with all their ads in place. Then decided I didn't have time to read it at that moment and clicked the instapaper "read later" bookmark, but by that time I have already seen and ignored your ads.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#38How does he know nobody will buy the Android app? I barely use any free apps other than the ones that come with Cyanogen Mod. Titanium Backup? Paid. ROM Manager? Paid. Treking? Paid. Android IRC? Paid. X-Plane? Paid. Android users have no problems paying for apps. Non-Android developers are afraid of the unknown.
I ported an iOS app to Android. I've sold three (!!) copies while in that same period, the iOS version has sold about 300. I dropped the price from $5 down to $2 over easter and still didn't sell a single copy during the sale.
The two apps have the same content and the sales funnel is exactly the same. (The only difference is the iOS app has lots of 5-star reviews.) It seems clear to me that Android users can't or won't pay for certain kinds of apps.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#39There's some incorrect logic in there to point out.
"The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won’t give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions."
So, a free user is less valuable than a paid user, fair enough. But not 100% of people who would use the free version will buy the paid version.
As he said in the second paragraph, "it’s hard to say which portion of the increase, if any, is attributable to Free’s absence"
While I'm not saying this is for sure, it is a possibility that, while one user with adverts gives him less money than one user who pays, cutting off all the free users could lose more money in advertising than it generates in sales.
Re: Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
#40"Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging a lot for an iPhone app from the start." AND there was a free version out. He's neglecting the "critical mass" factor. The free version helped him sell the full version until it reached that "critical mass" that was required for the popularity of the full version to continue to drive sales of itself.…
AND there's a free website that drives people to know about the ipad version in the first place.
This is actually a great point--why not provide a free web version and a paid iPhone version of any product?
Flash game developers do this (see Canabalt, World of Goo), so extending the model to iPhone apps isn't a bad idea.