Last month I wrote about a change I had made to one my old games in Ovi Store, Palleggio, and going from a paid to a free download. The results in downloads were pretty dramatic, and now at the end of the month here’s the numbers:
- March 2009 – Feb 2010: 63 paid downloads (@€1 EUR)
- 1st half March 2010: 3302 free downloads
- Total March 2010 (one day not shown in chart): 9462 free downloads
As I had seen earlier with free downloads, the tyop 5 countries had changed, and Italy remained out there on top, and the non-touchscreen devices were clear leaders (even though there was a touchscreen version available).
In looking at those downloads, I also then started experiementing with including some AdMob advertising into some free apps I created using the Ovi App Wizard. I created free apps that turned the RSS feed from some of my websites into Nokia WRT widgets and also Java apps so that basically all devices supported by Ovi Store were covered. The apps covered OviFlash.com, ToyTragic.com and this blog, DaleRankine.com, and in the last 2 weeks of March, the app for OviFlash.com had 7324 downloads and started earning about AU$3 a day from AdMob advertising. Guess I’ll have the deposit for that Maserati sooner than expected 
Overall, interesting stories have come out of this for me with Ovi Store. One is that without marketing these apps at all, or having them highly visible in the Ovi Store clients (web or mobile), you can still achieve some reasonable downloads. Add into that an ad-funded model, and depending ont he app you might make a tidy little sum of cash over a reasonable period of time (and by reasonable I mean you might be able to pay for the beer and pizza you used to bribe your developers to do the coding!). Real money will still only flow from paid apps that are heavily promoted and visible, or that generate significant word-of-mouth marketing.
I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!
So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …
From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.
Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?
And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well 
I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.
Happy new year everyone!
[Via All About Symbian] Mobile industry analyst Tomi T Ahonen has written up his thoughts and predictions for the smartphone market in 2010, covering all of the major players. It’s a very interesting read (especially for my new focus this year on iPhone and multiple platforms) and gives some important perspective to a much-hyped market segment that is skewed along geographical lines (see his comment on the US market in context to the actual size of the global smartphone market).
You’ll get the feeling (especially US-readers) that the author might be a bit of a Nokia fan, but overall I think he gives a pretty balanced and well-informed opinion. I’m not sure the mention of “bloodbath” in the title of the article is in fact warranted, but I do agree that 2010 will be an even more fiercely-fought period for ALL device manufacturers than last year.
The original Chumby was the first Flash Lite 3 enabled device (of any kind) on the market, but was always difficult to pitch in terms of what it was exactly. People found it hard to work out if it was an alarm clock? a squishy toy? a game device?
Well, with the launch of the new “Chumby One“, the company seems to have taken all of that on board. From the looks of the new unit, and the marketing material released so far, it’s very much been revamped into something that people might understand a bit better, even if it doesn’t look quite as cool as the original.
The new Chumby One looks far more like a bed-side clock radio – in fact, they say right up front that “it’s an internet alarm clock”. Being pitched as a device that people understand, with the “additional” feature of being WiFi connected, means that people will have a starting context for what to expect from the device. The “Chumby” features are secondary and compliment the key features and add value, rather than distract and confuse the consumer.
I think they guys have made a positive step with the release of this new version of the Chumby. Hopefully this will mean a better return on the investment already made in the platform, and have a flow on effect for sales of the original, and more “radical”, Chumby device.
Oh and by the way, the Chumby t-shirts are among the best and most comfortable I have ever owned! Buy them, and pre-order the Chumby One (for a discounted price of US$99.95), from the Chumby Store now.
There’s been a rapid increase in the netbook market over the past 12 months that has been hard to miss. Ultra-portable laptops that carry relatively large capabilities in a smaller package – perfect for travelling, remote or mobile business, kids, etc. All the major players have gotten into the space and made it very crowded, very quickly. Then you have new players like Nokia with their 3G Booklet, who are coming from a mobility-focus and bringing some innovation while staying fairly much in the mainstream (HDMI, 3G … but running Windows 7).
Then you have start-ups like the Boston-based “litl“. litl have gone about to redfine the “netbook” into an “web-book”; stripping away much of the normal “computer”astheics and features though, and bringing web-based content closer to the user (something that reminds me of the One Laptop Per Child program). The device stores all of its data in the cloud, and has multiple viewing modes that improve the experience depending on what kind of content you are browsing. Read More
