Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"
cardsagainsthumanity.com
cardsagainsthumanity.com
Of course, I'm talking here about direct sales, where the margin is pretty thin; I think middle-men are unnecessary, and obscene markup for name brand or just because you can is egregious.
Are you serious? People have cared mainly about price since the dawn of history. Obviously people have particular quality level they want, but once that's met if it's a tradeoff between quality and price, price virtually always wins.
I keep meaning to write a blog post about the results, but ~99.5% of people paid $0. Of the people who paid, probably around 50% paid the $1.99 I had as default, but what's really interesting to me is the way people priced it if they changed the value. I got a number of payments for amounts like $1.25 and $1.50, and I remember looking at those completely baffled -- who cares enough to pay anything for this (you could just download it for free -- I don't mind) but not enough to pay an extra $0.49? Really wish I had an answer there; maybe people just like 'getting a deal'?
Logical thinking won't help if you give it incorrect input data.
Unless you believe in supernatural; everything is math provided a correct model.
The idea that a model can do so has caused innumerable problems of late and it is frustrating to hear such myths perpetuated.
If you can't see a model you are not digging deep enough.
Though I understand your point of view. Some think that the fundamental physics can end i.e., a unified theory of everything is possible.
It is more likely that it is turtles all the way down i.e, we can always observe phenomena that contradict predictions of current theories (reveal assumptions that are not valid for the phenomenon).
I'm an Android guy myself so I might be wrong here (and your app is an example of non pirate usage for jail-breaking), but I often hear young relatives talking about jail-breaking their iPhones to save those $1-2 on apps, which to be honest, is pretty shitty behavior IMHO (yeah, I lecture them, they look at me like a crazy old person)
I quite often decide against offers because I feel they are marked up 20%-200% over what I perceive them to be worth, but have occasionally bought an extra copy later on (occasionally as a gift) if I've come to feel that I got a great deal originally. Other people pay grossly over the perceived worth if they want to support the seller for one reason or another.
Careful not to fall into the trap of conflating jailbreaking with piracy. There are many, many good reasons to JB not even counting apps that end in -ous. Google voice and SMS extensions, f.lux, theming support, wifi tethering, and a great deal more low level customization than Apple gives you.
Apparently even people "against humanity" still have a sense of justice.
For the same products, I feel I wouldn't change the price if it was listed at {3,4,5}.99$, I don't really know why. 1.99$ feels too close to an transaction fee, or some kind of things like that that feels like the money will be lost in The System. While paying >3.99$ seems to have more consistence, more purpose, since my intuition tells me that more of the value will end up in the proper pockets.
That's a very subjective take on this, but I support your idea that more people might have paid if the default would have been 3.99$.
I would have done this. And if there wouldn't be an easy way later on to pay/donate, I would have just leave it unpaid.
I've found that I'll definitely pay for things after I've tried them, but I'm more hesitant to do it before.
You collect credit card info upfront, deliver the information they opted in for with their cc, then the option to not process your cc is presented.
You could even also opt to not share your e-mail address with the developer by paying directly, before accessing the thing at all.
At first glance I want to put in $0.00 just to see if it works, not necessarily because that's what I'd be willing to pay.
I think it's a good anchor price and if I was feeling generous it's a low enough value where I'd pay double. At a minimum I'd pay their asking price because after getting many hours of fun out of the game with friends it's definitely worth at least that.
Just by giving a starting value predisposes people towards that value. And in this case, it was low enough people would impulse buy with the default value left in. Contrast to the Humble Bundles where their true value is much larger, so people tend to weigh the value against other purchases from their peers or prior purchases (which is why the median prices seem invariant between bundles).
Car dealerships do this all the time with the MSRP numbers they put on their vehicles (which are, typically speaking, wildly inflated from their cost basis). Seasoned negotiators do this, as well -- anchoring either high or low, depending on their objectives.
I would be willing to bet that an A/B test of a higher suggested price and a lower suggested price would yield better returns from the higher suggested price.
Anchoring is especially effective in cases where people have no real sense of the intrinsic value of something. For instance, if I offered someone a bar of palladium, they'd generally have no freaking clue what they should pay. I could tell them $2000, or I could tell them $200,000. The $200,000 offer might not actually get any takers at $200,000. But it would generate a much higher negotiated price than the $2000 offer would, because people would mentally start at $200,000, and then try to work down from it.
Finding the price that the market will bare is precisely how you determine a product's monetary value.
Side note: if you want to see a entrepreneurial community without morals, I could point you to some places that would make you reconsider your opinion of HN.
Real world: Customer A thinks the $14 pizza is overpriced. No sale. Customer B thinks the $14 pizza is delicious and worth it. Would pay up to $20 if forced. Pays $14 and enjoys $6 in surplus value.
Ideal world: Customer A thinks the $14 pizza is worth about $6. Buys it for $6 (Arriving at the deal is the tricky part). Customer B thinks the $20 pizza is worth about $20. Buys it for $20 (Arriving at the deal is the tricky part).
Now both customers are happy with their pizzas, and the pizza maker made $26 in revenue instead of $14.
There is no "true" price for anything. It's not morally wrong for the cheap customer to pay $1 in a PWYW deal, and it's not morally wrong for the seller to enjoy it when someone pays $100 in the same deal.
Further complexities: maybe it's a slow day and those employees were idle, and the raw materials were going to go bad without being used anyway - so if the $6 customer is buying it as cost the pizza maker may still be winning. Especially if they sold some fountain drinks to that customer, which are almost pure profit.
If you want a sustainable business, you need to cover your materials cost. Arguably paying less than the materials/shipping cost for something is morally wrong, especially if you know damn well this thing costs more than that to make and ship.
When ordering, you had to enter your amount before adding it to the cart, with $5 as the default. There wasn't an option to change it later that I could find. By the time I realized it couldn't be changed, I was through most of the ordering process and didn't feel like starting over.
It would be interesting to see how much better they would have done with either a more intuitive checkout (assuming I missed an option) or had more options in the process.
I do remember trying to bump the payment to $10 and not being able to. Adding an option to change the amount paid during checkout or making it much more obvious if there was one may have helped your "haul".
Long story short, the credit card charge went through, the package did not get shipped, and she's in the middle of resolving the situation via email with somebody at CaH, hoping her giftee gets their gift.
On the other hand, how come all the design work, copy writing, etc are considered free? That's just masking the actual cost of the product.
Looking at their quirky web page of comparisons, I think it would be hilarious if the wikipedia deletionist camp responded by deleting all the articles quoted on their page. I'll never donate a penny to wikipedia until that social problem is eradicated. "Here's $70K of value... whoops deleted"
I developed this site. I'll be around for a little while if you have any tech questions.
Edit: Please note that this pay what you can was just for the holiday-related expansion set, not the full game.
That's good to know. Did you offer any suggested pricing for the expansion pack? i.e $10, like the other packs? Or did you only list the cost price?
Not sure what your nag screen said, but an A/B against putting it in those terms might have been interesting.
(I was actually planning on paying $10, until I couldn't see how to enter different shipping addresses, at which point I changed my plan to pay $0 and enter just my shipping address. And then I proceeded to fail at both plans, not submitting the form at all due to my own forgetfulness.)
And it's teens without credit cards.
So I doubt you could really compare it to other things.
People are not curious if they can take a bagel for free - it's obvious that they can. So people are not tempted to do it just for the experiment.
And people wanting to pay can use cash, so the second situation doesn't apply either.
Most real world situations are more like this case than the cards case.
Thinking more, I do remember reading about someone who started a business in DC delivering muffin baskets to beltway-area office buildings. Their business was purely honesty based, and I think losses due to cheapskatery were around 5%. In the end, they'd cut off buildings with rates worse than that. All that is more support for your points.
I did see this on reddit, I believe from someone who paid $0. I really hope it's real.
i.e. Are the type of people who find these cards hilarious more prone to acting with "jerk" behavior?
Only a hypothesis, but worth a look, since my primary assumption is that this is a selective (and interested) audience given that it's an expansion pack.
In certain designated areas of life, such as during a boxing match, the rules are different: if you're in a boxing match, you can indeed punch someone, and you won't get thrown in jail or suffer any other sanction (other than being punched back). A boxer who punches his opponent in a boxing match is not a jerk, because that is permitted by mutually agreed upon rules in that context.
In the case of the cards, the rules do explicitly allow paying $0, so it's in no sense a perversion of the rules, and people who paid $0 are not jerks.
"The rules" don't define whether you are a jerk or not. How you behave in the situation, does. They said up front that it cost them $3 to give you the cards. If you paid $0, you knowingly gave them the shaft. That's jerky.
This reminds me of http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/03/05/holding-t...
I invite you to score yourself in the psychopathy checklist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist) and let us know how it went.
Why are you so angry over this? Perhaps you should seek help.
Rules were established. Transactions were carried out according to those rules. Shock, horror, your supposed victim even made a profit (according to their own accounting). Why are you angry?
The wording also said there was a suggested price of $5. "Pay what you want" is the equivalent of saying "tip what you want". You could "game" an open bar by never tipping, but that would make you a huge jerk.
Society is not based on rules. It is based on social interaction. You can break the rules and not be a jerk, and you can follow the rules and be a jerk. Rules have nothing to do with jerkitude.
Oh, and if I told someone "take as many potato skins as you want" with a bunch of other people there who might also like potato skins, and you take them all, you are again a huge jerk. Being nice to other people is important. Just like you shouldn't take all the potato skins, you should try to reimburse the makers of the game for at least their cost.
Everyone who bought the cards for under $3 was faced with a decision: do I want these badly enough to literally cost the people who make them money?
Did you answer yes? Cool, you probably acted selfishly. Own it.
It'd be interesting to see if the "pay what you want" strategy works for you guys a second time now that you released such detailed data. You'd think it might make people more likely to pay exactly your equilibrium point just to see if they can get away with it.
I then went about my business, completely forgot about the question I asked on facebook (because they never answered), and never ended up submitting the form.
Oh well.
http://www.caribbeanislandbrokers.com/islands-for-sale/Littl...
I'd love to compare the results of this with other 'pay-what-you-want' schemes.
Edit: "We did all of the web design, video production, motion design, and copy writing ourselves, so these were free." I wonder if the cost of this would technically have put them at a loss (I suspect not).
I went to the website, saw it was a card game and thought I would learn more about it as I like card games. I play card games.
I clicked on "How do I play Cards Against Humanity" under the "Your dumb questions" but quickly lost interest when I would have had to click on "Read the fucking rules" to learn more about the game.
I get it... it is probably an edgy game... it probably is not for me. I guess I will never know as I just don’t want to "read the fucking rules".
EDIT: Fixed typo.
Plus the cards are awesome, I don't see how anyone could not want go out and buy the full set and the expansions after seeing this pack.
Example:
"Alternative medicine is now embracing the curative powers of ______ " was read aloud in my group.
I played the card that reads "Literally eating shit" and won the round, because the question reader liked my answer the most.
I had the "Haiku, pick 3" black card
which resulted in http://imgur.com/pcfgJ
I was laughing so hard that I was crying, just trying to read them out loud.
That's not entirely true. Opportunity cost is still a huge cost.
Source: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...
Last financial report: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_Reports/Financ...
Two good times to recommend alternative charities: (i) on threads where people ask, "where should I donate my money", and (ii) on threads about disasters, when you have an opportunity to spur donations to targeted charities.
You almost certainly didn't mean anything by this comment, but you generally want to avoid the appearance of litigating someone's good deed as a missed opportunity to do a better deed. Donations to Wikimedia are a good thing, worthy of congratulations.
Your unfair question basically boils down to "My worthy cause is more worthy than your worthy cause!"
I was also a little disappointed to see Wikimedia called a 'charity'. Because people ask you for money does not make them a worthy cause. Now, I'm sure Wikimedia is doing what they do out of the goodness of their hearts. But its not the same as feeding the hungry. In fact, its kind of a first-world problem being solved, isn't it?