为什么免费instapaper一直迟迟不上架 – Marco.org

译者 jessicatriangle

Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store1 for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app. Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.

去年秋天，我进行了一次实验：我悄悄的从应用商店里把免费 Instapaper应用 给删除了三天，只留下需要4.99美元的 Instapaper 应用。结果不但销量递增，而且貌似没有人注意到这个变化。

On March 12, knowing I was heading into very strong sales from the iPad 2’s launch, I pulled Free again, this time for a month. Again, nobody noticed, and sales increased (although it’s hard to say which portion of the increase, if any, is attributable to Free’s absence, since most of it is from the iPad 2’s launch).

三月十二号，众所周知ipad2发售以来，销量强劲，我又撤走了免费 Instapaper 应用，为期一个月。同样，依然没有人注意到，而销量还在增长。（尽管很难说出销售的比例，若有的话，也归功于免费应用的下架，特别是从ipad2面市以来)。

This break went so well that I pushed the return date back by another month. I may keep it out indefinitely, effectively discontinuing Instapaper Free.

这个方法如此顺利，因此我将它下架的时间又延长了一个月。我也许会将其无限期撤走，有效地中止免费 Instapaper 应用的供应。

Here’s why: Background

原因如下：背景

The paid app has never been “on sale”. It launched in the fall of 2008 at $9.99, and in June 2009, I dropped the price to $4.99, where it remains. I have no plans to drop it further.2

付费应用从未减价。它从08年秋天以9.99美元的价格推出，在2009年六月，我将其价格降低到4.99美元，之后价格一直不变。我也不打算继续降价。

When it was still available, Instapaper Free was downloaded about 3 times more often than the paid app. This is a very good ratio, especially given such an “expensive” paid app.

而只要免费 Instapaper 应用还在，它的下载量就是付费 Instapaper 的三倍。这其实是一个非常好的比例，特别是在这个付费应用可不便宜的情况下。

The iPad represents about half of my business, but I’ve never offered a free iPad app, and almost nobody has ever asked for one. (Instapaper Free is iPhone-only. Like most iPhone apps, it will run in the iPad’s “2X” simulator, but it’s terrible.) Bad economics

我的生意有一半都来自ipad，但我从不提供免费的ipad应用，几乎也没有人要求一个免费应用。（ Instapaper 应用是只给iPhone用的，像大多数的iPhone应用一样，它在ipad的2x模式下可以运行，但效果非常糟糕。）

Maintaining a second configuration of the app incurs direct, significant costs in development and support. Furthermore, the Instapaper web service that powers the app costs a good amount of money and time to operate every month. So Free users have a direct cost to me.

保养应用的配置，还有开发支持，这都需要花钱，此外，为此应用提供支持服务的网络站点每个月也要花大量的时间和金钱维持运行。因此免费应用用户也增加了我的直接成本。

On the website, this cost is defrayed by ads from The Deck, but people using the iOS app might never visit the website. So Instapaper Free has an ad from The Deck in its list screen. It’s unintrusive, its advertisers are respectable, and it pays well. It’s the best ad unit I could ask for.

在网站上，这些开支都由广告商Deck公司支出，但那些使用IOS应用的人也许从不访问网站。所以免费应用客户在列表中就会看到Deck的广告。这些广告并非插件，广告商很好，给出了很高的价钱，这也是我能要求的最好的广告单位。

But it still makes far less than paid-app sales — the increase in app sales with Free’s absence exceeds this many times over. The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won’t give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions.3 Undesirable customers

即使有广告，免费产品仍然比付费产品要差得多——免费应用下架过程中，付费应用销售上涨了许多倍。这很容易用数据来解释：大多数的免费应用客户除了能给我3.5美元的广告价值以外，什么都没有。 3 不受欢迎的客户

Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable.

比起ipad应用，itune里的免费 Instapaper 应用老是得到差评。当然，一部分原因是ipad应用要好些，但是许多的对免费应用评价是完全不合理的。

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

只有那些买得起付费应用的人——从而5美元买一个应用也不成问题的人——能够对其发表评论。这样，很多那些喜欢发表不合理的，过激的，甚至是不可思议的评价的客户，就被价格过滤掉了。（这也可以过滤掉那些要求太高的人）

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?

我无需每个消费者都来购买我的产品。我卖产品首要的目的就是钱。

(This is also a major reason why I have no plans to enter the Android market.) Low conversions

（这也是我不准备加入安卓市场的主要原因。）低回报。

This is difficult to measure accurately, but from what I can infer from the server-side data and support emails, very few people ever upgraded from Free to the paid app. Nearly all paid-app customers went straight to it without stopping at Free along the way.

虽然很难精确计算，但是我从服务器端得到的数据和支持的邮件来看，很少有人真正从免费应用升级到付费应用。而几乎所有的付费应用客户会直接升级，而不理会那些免费应用。

The most common reasoning I heard when I asked Free users why they hadn’t bought the paid app: Free was “good enough” for them. Some were “planning to upgrade” someday. (In practice, that day rarely comes.)

当我问那些免费用户，为什么他们不买付费应用时，我听到的最普遍的回答是：免费应用对于他们来说已经够用了，或者是他们正在计划改天去升级系统应用。（事实上，这个“改天”一直都在改天）

If I don’t have a free app for a long time, I’m certainly going to miss out on some potential long-term conversions. But how many, really, and what would it cost to chase them? Image and product-design problems

如果我很长一段时间不提供免费应用，我理所当然的会失去那些潜在的长期回报。但是真的能有多少呢？而一味追寻这些潜在回报，又将花费多少呢？

If you have a free version of your app, that will be the only version many people will ever see. So, for the Free users, that app — that extremely limited app that lacks almost all of Instapaper’s best features — is what they think Instapaper is.

如果你有一个你应用的免费版，那会将是许多人见过的唯一版本。因此，对免费使用者来说，那种应用——各种功能都有限制的应用，根本缺乏所有 Instapaper 最好的产品特色——而这些特色也是他们认为 Instapaper 本应该具备的特色。

I was giving them a choice: Stick with this limited app, or upgrade to the paid version with all of these great features. But since they had never used those features, they didn’t know how much they wanted them.

我曾给这些人一个选择：继续使用不完整的应用，或者是升级到拥有所有特色的付费版。但是他们从没有使用过这些特色服务，因此他们也不知道自己有多么需要它。

So most Free users rationalized away the need because they didn’t want to spend the money: “I can put up with ads. I can only keep 10 articles. I don’t think I’ll need any of those other features.”

所以大多数的免费用户都找到借口不需要付费产品，因为他们不想为此花钱：“我受不了广告，我只能保存十篇。我不认为我需要那些特色服务。”

And choosing which features to put into Free has always been very difficult. If I give it too much, I risk wrecking sales of the paid app. If I give it too little, I further harm Instapaper’s image among all of these people.

在免费应用中加入何种特色也让人头疼。如果我给的太多，那么就有降低付费应用销量的风险。如果给的太少，我将会进一步损害 Instapaper 在这些消费者心目中的形象。

I don’t think it’s a net positive for my mediocre free app to show up next to my great $4.99 app whenever anyone searches for Instapaper in the App Store. Minimal demand

无论合适人们在应用商店搜索 Instapaper 时，平庸的免费版出现在4.99美元付费完美版旁边，我不认为这是这是百利而无一害的。

It’s important to reiterate how few people have noticed the Free app’s absence in the nearly two months that it’s been off the App Store. And almost nobody ever asked me for a free version on iPad, even though that’s half of my business.

很有必要重申这个事实，几乎没有人注意到免费应用从应用商店里面下架两个月。即使ipad是我生意的半壁江山，几乎也没人向我要求一个免费版。

When there’s no free option, and the only way to try an appealing app is to pay a small amount of money, people do. Not everyone will, but enough will.

当没有免费应用可选择时，人们唯一肯尝试让他们心动的应用产品的办法是，付很少一笔钱。不是每个人都会这样做，但是有足够的人会这样做。

I’m asking people who bought a $200-829 device (many of whom also pay monthly for data service) to take a $5 risk. People risk that much for a side-dish of mashed potatoes that might suck at a restaurant, or a tremendous milkshake at Starbucks that they’ll finish in 30 minutes, without much consideration. iPad and iPhone owners often risk $30-70 on a case that they might break, lose, or get bored with after a few months.

让那些花200美元购买829设备的人冒一个5美元的险，通常会毫不迟疑，这就像在餐馆点一份很可能难吃的土豆泥做配餐，或者是在星巴克点一大杯三十分钟内就会喝完的奶昔，ipad和iPhone用户通常都会花30美元冒险购买一些他们丢掉，弄烂，甚至是几个月后就厌倦了的应用。

In an Apple store, it’s nearly impossible to spend less than $30 on anything. Apple’s stance is clear: “This is how much our stuff costs. If you don’t like our prices, that’s fine. We don’t need everyone to buy our stuff.”

在苹果店里，别想花少于30美元的价格买任何东西。苹果的立场非常鲜明：“这就是我们产品的价格，如果你不喜欢我们的价格，没关系，我们不需要每个人都来买我们的产品。”

That’s roughly the stance I’ve chosen to take. My app costs $5. I understand that not everyone will like my price, and that’s fine. I don’t need every iOS-device owner to buy my app — I’d do quite well even if only 1% of them did.4 Disclaimer (“That’s fine for Merlin…”)

这是我一个大致的立场。我的产品价值5美元。我理解不是每个人都会喜欢这个价格，没有关系，不需要每个ios设备使用者都来购买我的应用——只要他们中间有1%的购买，我就可以做的非常好。

If you’re a developer, you’re probably talking yourself out of making a move like this because you think Instapaper is a special case.

如果你是一个开发者，你也许认为 Instapaper 只是一个特例，而不这样做。

Every app is a special case.

但是每个应用都是一个特例。

Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging “a lot” for an iPhone app from the start.

也许你认为我可以这样做，是由于 Instapaper 已经很流行了。但是最初从一个iPhone应用到现在这么流行，期间是付出了许多的。

Maybe you think I can only do this because my blog is moderately popular among geeks like me. If so, I assure you that my blog’s audience is smaller than you think,5 and is extremely insignificant relative to the size of the iOS app market.

又或者你认为我可以这样做，是因为我的博客在那些怪咖中比较流行。如果这样，我可以向你保障我的观众群绝对比你想的要小得多，而且这对于拓展ios应用市场根本无关紧要。

Maybe you think there aren’t enough people willing to pay $5 for an app with no free version. I used to think that, too. But I was wrong.

你还可以认为其实没有那么多人愿意花5美元，买一个没有免费版的应用。我之前也这么想，但我错了。

I’ve made a lot of assumptions in the app market over the last three years that turned out to be wrong. Most frequently, I underestimate demand, both for my product and for others.

在过去三年我对应用软件市场做过许多被证明是错误的设想。最常见的错误就是我低估了市场需求量，无论是对我自己的产品，还是其他的。

I don’t know if I’ll remove Instapaper Free forever, and I don’t know if it’s going to be a good long-term idea, and I don’t know if you can apply any of this to your product.

我不知道我是否会永久撤销免费 Instapaper ，我也不知道这是否是一个好的长期想法，我不知道是否能让这个方法适用于你的产品。

The only way to figure any of this out is to experiment, and the best way to benefit the community is to share the results of such experiments. So that’s what I’m doing, and if you do anything similar, I’d love to read about it.

唯一的答案就是试验，让整个群体都受益的最好办法则是分享试验的结果，这也是我正在做的事情，如果你也在做类似的事，我也乐意看看了解。

Developers: You can pull an app from the store for any period of time you want and have it seamlessly return. Set its Availability Date to sometime in the future. Within hours, it will disappear from the Store, and it will reappear on the date you set. ↩

开发者们：你可以在任意你想的时间段里，将某个应用从商店撤下，再天衣无缝地放回去。方法是这样：设定将来某一刻为回归日，几小时内，它就从商店消失，然后在你设定的回归日出现。

I priced Instapaper at the highest level I thought could sell in reasonable volume in the App Store. When the App Store launched, that level was $9.99, but it quickly collapsed. I stayed firm, but it became clear to me by the next year that even I wouldn’t risk $9.99 on many apps, so I dropped it to what I guessed to be the most money I could charge for a lot of people to still impulse-buy it instead of “plan to maybe buy it someday”: $4.99. That worked, and that’s where I’ve held the price since then. ↩

对于 Instapaper 的定价，我定位于应用商店里我能想到的最高的合理价格。当应用商店刚开始时，价格水平在9.9美元，但马上就暴跌了。我仍然坚持不降，可是第二年我意识到我许多应用的价格如果还是9.9美元将会非常冒险，所以我将其降到4.99美元，相信许多人看到这个价格依然会有想买的冲动，而不仅仅是想“也许改天再来买”。 这个方法奏效了，从那开始我便一直维持着这个价格。

$3.50 is my cut of the $4.99 price after Apple takes its 30%. Even if the ad would yield a remarkable $5 CPM, it would take 700 views — launching the app nearly every day for two years — to match that. I’m sure some people would launch the Free app that frequently, but certainly nowhere near the majority. ↩

3.5美元的价格是我的纯收入，也就是减掉苹果公司拿走的30%.虽然广告的收益是每一千人5美元，但是这需要700个访问量才能做到——即连续两年每天都访问应用商店。我肯定有一部分人会这样做，但绝对不是大多数。

If “only” 1% of current iOS-device owners bought Instapaper, I’d make about $5 million. I’dlove to have 1% of the market. ↩

如果只有1%的ios设备使用者购买 Instapaper ，我还能赚5百万美元，那么我乐意只占1%的市场。

Currently, I have about 19,000 RSS subscribers, and I’ve had an unusually good 370,000 pageviews in the last 30 days. That’s a lot compared to zero, but relative to other popularsites, it’s not much. ↩

目前，我有19000个RSS订阅者，在最近三十天中，达到了370000综合浏览量，这个结果出乎意料地好。这比什么都没有要好得多，但是比起那些普及的站点来说，还不是很多。