barrynolan

Quick question. When you signed up to your say 20meg broadband contract, did the contract exclude certain services - YouTube, amazon Prime, Netflix?

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.

Excellent point. But it would screw (even further) with their carrier relations. The carriers hate iMessage and push notifications as it is.

Really nice site and execution.

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.

Is the "developer community energized"?

It is what it is. A great demonstration of developer productivity. And the stack mob API is free.