Dexterity,

I read some of your articles, very interesting. I got a question about the download count. I am doing some research now, I read some advices in your article(s). A download count on download.com can tell if a product will get a low conversion rate (low=when demo downloads are low) or high conversion rate (high=when demo downloads are very high) is this true? Can you confirm this, please. Is this information also usefull for business software, like journal, support, inventory, CRM etc. Low conversion means low sales. I ask this because you said a while ago that download sites aren't responsible for sales, only for traffic to the developer/publisher website. So this made some confusion to me, unfortunately.


For instance:
Downloads: 18,185
Publisher: DavidRM Software
Date added: January 20, 2002
File size: 2.98MB; Clock this download
License: Free to try; $39.95 to buy
Uninstaller included?: Yes

The Journal has a total of 18.185 downloads, date added is January 20, 2002. To my opinion this is a low download count, there is about one year over. But David earns a living, how is that possible. Other download sites aren't generating much more download traffic then download.com. Perhaps the search engine is doing an important part of the traffic to his website.

Thanks for your help.

i believe what steve meant by conversion rate
is how much of the downloads turns to sales,
i.e. sales/downloads.

you can have 10000 downloads and 7 people buying it
or you can have 200 people buying it.

The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/) has never received a lot of downloads. In a normal month, it gets downloaded from 1000-1500 times (in December and January it tends to do much better). But it has a pretty good conversion rate.

Part of the reason for the high conversion rate is that people find The Journal primarily by *looking* for it. They go to Google or Download.com or wherever and do a search on journal/diary software. They aren't downloading it on a whim, just to see what it looks like. This means that most of the people downloading The Journal are already in the market for exactly this kind of software.

With games, you get a lot more "sightseers". People who will download a lot of games at one time and then give them all a quick look-see.

-David

Originally posted by DavidRM
The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/) has never received a lot of downloads. In a normal month, it gets downloaded from 1000-1500 times (in December and January it tends to do much better). But it has a pretty good conversion rate.

Part of the reason for the high conversion rate is that people find The Journal primarily by *looking* for it. They go to Google or Download.com or wherever and do a search on journal/diary software. They aren't downloading it on a whim, just to see what it looks like. This means that most of the people downloading The Journal are already in the market for exactly this kind of software.

With games, you get a lot more "sightseers". People who will download a lot of games at one time and then give them all a quick look-see.

-David

Thanks for your reply David. Your Journal software looks very interesting. How many months was it in developing?

Originally posted by DavidRM
Part of the reason for the high conversion rate is that people find The Journal primarily by *looking* for it. They go to Google or Download.com or wherever and do a search on journal/diary software. They aren't downloading it on a whim, just to see what it looks like. This means that most of the people downloading The Journal are already in the market for exactly this kind of software.

With games, you get a lot more "sightseers". People who will download a lot of games at one time and then give them all a quick look-see.
-David

If this is the same for business software it means that the download count isn't very important. So for good reasearch it isn't usefull.

Download.com is only one download site among hundreds. There are many other ways to generate sales. If download.com disappeared tomorrow, I probably wouldn't even notice a decline in our sales. But for some people, such an event would be extremely noticeable.

When we were just starting out, sites like download.com and ZDNet were very significant as a percentage of our total downloads and sales. But those sites have changed, and now the downloads through our own site are high enough that even download.com is relatively insignificant.

If you only have one product, then downloads are very important. But over time factors like repeat business and word of mouth can become more important.

Also, I tend not to trust download figures on other sites too much, since I have no way of knowing how they're calculated.

Originally posted by johnson
If this is the same for business software it means that the download count isn't very important. So for good reasearch it isn't usefull.

Download count and conversion rate are both important. They are both limiting factors. If only 100 people download your software the absolute largest number of sales you can hope to achieve is 100. If your conversion rate is .02% then even if you get 20,000 downloads a month the most you can hope to sell is 4 copies a month. What's required is a decent number of downloads and a decent conversion ratio working together.

Another factor you seem to be ignoring is downloads or trials that don't happen from or on sites. For instance, many magazines put demos on their cover CD's and that can generate sales. In practice it's pretty hard to figure out your coversion rate exactly. We all just estimate it as best we can.

Given bandwidth costs it's even possible to increase your downloads to a point where a particular game is losing money because the conversion rate is too low.

One note though about conversions. A conversion rate is not always a conversion rate. That is.. If Realarcade published your game and you get a conversion rate of 2% that DOES NOT MEAN that you will get a convesion rate of 2% if you place an ad in the new york times and get 100,000 downloads. You have to factor in who the audience is. That's why a lot of people lose their shirts advertising. They use the wrong conversion rate. As a general rule of thumb I'd say the wider the audience you hit the more affected your conversion rate will be. As an extreme example, consider pitching a new kids game to 100,000 parents vs. 100,000 young batchelors. Both audiences will sell but the parents group will probably sell much better.

Oh, and just to be clear, by conversion rate I mean...

the number of sales/number of downloads

Usually the 2nd figure is an estimate that takes into account a few errors or modifying factors. I usually base the number of downloads by the number of gigabytes tranferred x some percentage to correct for failed downloads and people that download but don't try and machines on which the game doesnt run etc... That's a pretty rough figure though. Ideally I'd know exactly what all those numbers are, but some are really tough to come by because we don't have a closed clear system for generating the stats.

Dexterity wrote:

Also, I tend not to trust download figures on other sites too much, since I have no way of knowing how they're calculated.


At www.download.com theres a game that has 1,371 downloads from last week. Now I happen to know that the site was taken down last year because the people selling it were breaching someones copyright.


So download.com's figures must be based on the number of *attempted* downloads rather than the number of *completed* downloads.