New in the sense that GoPro has opened access to them - we ride, climb, fall, swim from the persons perspective. I'd wager their perennial popularity on the youtubes drives interest/adoption in action sports
Apple already implements a solution for free trial of apps. They're called Newsstand apps - and sadly, only available to Newsstand publishers.
Newsstand allows a free trial period. Typically it's a month.
If you like the publication enough after your trial, you can pay a monthly or annual fee. From my experience, approximately 2% of users convert to paid plans.
Download Volumes. Free trial app : upfront paid apps - 250:1. The (automated) marketing challenge becomes converting new users into paying customers.
Most paid plans for magazines are circa $4.99/month. This resembles a SaaS fee to use your app and all its wonderful upgrades.
Thanks for jumping in. It's great to get 'the other side'.
That said, where I checking out, my eye gravitates toward that big red 'Continue Checkout' button, not the fact that I'm signing up for $479.40 a year. A more blunt but upfront UX would hit them with interstitials.
One of the real challenges with Newsstand apps is the conversion of users (downloaded the app) to paying subscribers (monthly, annually). I've seen conversion rates as low as 1% (not including churn) for some very established publications.
So the challenge isn't just getting the eyeballs, its keeping and charging them to make a business. There are some techniques you can use that make an impact.
Asides from my ever expanding girth, I've never been described as a whale!
It all ads up...from $1,500 for TV sub, plus biz travel with hotel tonight, taxi's here and there, netflix, spotify. You are dead right on games, and that the IAP economy is hidden. Same too, the credit card economy/transactions through apps is hidden. There's a lot of money behind free apps, and everything is ad related.
I was wondering why there are so many dashboard cams. Answer: from the NYTimes
"Some of the numerous videos that quickly emerged of the incident highlighted a distinctly Russian phenomenon: the dashboard cam. As Business Insider recently pointed out, they are commonplace in Russia partly because of the dangerous driving conditions that lead to so many accidents, and with an unreliable police force such cameras can provide valuable evidence following a crash."
Both arguments are correct - mobile is the future of customer engagement, and persistent engagement in mobile apps is hard. It’s especially hard because the tools we use in the physical or virtual world (CRM, messages, updates, tutorials, polls, questions, feedback, dialog, etc), by and large don’t yet exist for the mobile app world. These tools are the grease to iteration to get app engagement to a better place. Today the mobile apps publishers are hermetically sealed from both knowing and communicating with their app users. This is the problem our startup converser.io is addressing.
I hear what you're saying but in my family (Irish so sample size is huge) Dad, my father in-law, my kids (<5), two teenage nieces (admittedly the have access to a Mac, but its probably a 20% use case) are iPad only.
It's a great validation of developing and iterating the business initially with the small 'mom & pop' business to the point where traction allows you capture the really massive customers.
My first ever job was to demonstrate this to 'enterprisy' land in 1990. It was unquestionably the future. I would launch dial up, make a connection, and showed pages which were actually from CEEFAX. I was hailed a boy genius, neither status which obviously no longer applies.
Who is he referring to here? " For those who have depended on the self-described patent expert for your understanding of this case . . . well, maybe now you will know better than to trust a paid spokesman." FOSS Patents?