Post-hoc Analysis of InstaWifi’s Launch
jessechen.net
jessechen.net
I was a little mislead by the title being "the average person donated 7.66$" rather than "of people who donated, the average donation was $7.66," i.e. the average user did not actually donate money. Nevertheless, this was a high price to pay in a day and age when people avoid paying $0.99 for the most entertaining and useful apps.
I have not yet downloaded the app (I am about to), but I am very appreciative of the decision to not put ads in the app. I am a strong believer that the ad-supported model must be broken, and I believe the way this will happen will be via true usefulness and content depth (with which money can come from in-app purchases, etc.).
When I found out that the average donation from the people who donated was ~7$, I was pretty surprised because like you said, most people are hesitant to even pay $0.99 for a high quality app.
In my opinion, ads makes the quality of the app suffer and it gives me a negative perception of the app. There will be some people who are willing to pay to remove the ads, but if you think about the use case for InstaWifi, the # of minutes spent _in_ the app is not that high so its not worthwhile to put ads anyway. I think ads only work on apps that are extremely popular with high # of downloads. Otherwise, in general, I recommend against ads.