What’s Poptiq Worth? Here’s what our users said:
Three weeks ago we started asking our users what they thought Poptiq was worth. Our goal was to get real users’ opinions on the value we provided, so we could proceed with a service pricing model that was fair. Specifically we asked whether users thought Poptiq should be an ad-supported or subscription based service. If they thought it should be subscription, we asked what rate. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have been extremely pleased with the number of responses to the question – both in terms of opinions and comments. As we expected, this is a topic users seem to care about. So, here’s a summary of the results:
78% of the responses were in favour of a service supported by ads. These users didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for the service, but were willing to accept being shown highly targeted ads matched with the videos. This is great news, as the mobile advertising industry (current state of the economy aside) is starting to take shape. Advertisers are recognizing the value of mobile engagement and with Poptiq’s personal relevancy model, the ads will be well targeted.
22% of the responses indicated that Poptiq shouldn’t have ads. These users were willing to pay a monthly fee for the service; suggestions ranged from $0.99 to $20.00. The distribution was trimodal: a cluster of users in the $2-$3 range, a cluster in the $5 range, and a cluster at $10. There was a ’smattering’ of users above $10, but not enough to be statistically significant. Now this is interesting. Here’s a group of users who may have found the Poptiq experience compelling enough to exchange it for some of their hard earned cash, or they are offended by the idea of mobile advertising and will pay to make it go away. Perhaps there are other reasons which we might never find out, but regardless, this is still a large enough group of users to suggest that there is a market for a subscription based mobile video service.
There’s a deeper level of analysis that we are working on such as correlating the duration of use (how long they have been using Poptiq) and the frequency of use (how often they use Poptiq) to better understand how these opinions on value line up with varying degrees of engagement. Drop me a note if your interested in hearing more about this, once we’ve crunched the numbers and examined the patterns I’d be happy to share some of those details.
So now what? I guess that means we’re going to have two different versions of Poptiq! The dev team has already started working on changes to the app and changes to the service to make sure we can properly deliver on both. Shawn and I are going to spend a lot more time with our ad partners to make sure that we have appropriate ads to deliver. And we’ve still got a number of new features to roll into the mix for the next release. In the mean time, we’ll leave Poptiq as a free app in the App Store.
Finally, those of you who’ve provided feedback and opinions on what you thought Poptiq is worth, thank you. We’re listening, and we’ll do it right.
Dave.
Tags: ad support, paid content