[X4U] MacUpdate Special Offer

[Neil Laubenthal]

On Jul 19, 2007, at 23:06, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> At 9:17 PM -0400 7/19/07, Neil Laubenthal wrote:
>> Not my business of course . . . but from the last MacHeist it  
>> appeared that the MacHeister's came out a lot better on the  
>> financial end than the authors did.
>
> My guess is that these deals are worth it to the authors.   
> Personally I'd not have paid the money for any single one of these  
> programs, with the exception of TechTool Pro (which I haven't  
> purchased as I've been using DiskWarrior since I moved to OS X, and  
> have the crumby Applized AppleCare version).  I love "Fetch", but  
> it ticked me off when they went commercial, sorry, I'm not paying  
> for something like that when I have 'ftp' and 'wget' on the command- 
> line.  A couple others I've been interested in, but not enough to  
> lay down any money. Thanks to this, they all get a small amount of  
> money they wouldn't otherwise.

I'm not saying that the authors aren't making any money . . . .but  
back when the first MacHeist happened a couple of folks on various  
lists (can't remember if it was here or elsewhere; but they were  
shareware authors of some note . . . you've heard of their stuff) did  
an analysis based on what MacHeist's gross income was and how much  
went to the authors. IIRC, the payments to authors were down in the  
5000 or so range . . . and the gross receipts of the MacHeist program  
were up in the several hundreds of thousands.

So in round numbers . . . if it was 12 packages and they paid each  
author 5000 that's about 60K total. Granted; they did have some  
hosting and bandwidth costs . . . and I'm not saying that the  
MacHeist guys don't deserve to make a profit. But if the gross was  
300K (and IIRC it was more than that based on the package cost and  
the announced sales) call it 60K for the authors, 10K for the  
bandwidth, 10K for advertising, which leaves in excess of 200K  
profit. That doesn't seem to be a very fair distribution of the net  
profit . . . and at least several of the aforementioned authors  
specifically noted that the inequity was why they weren't participating.

I realize that there is some benefit because of the exposure . . .  
and each developer will naturally make his/her own decision. However,  
if your package normally sells for 25 bucks and you take 5000 for  
1000 copies; then your net for each copy is only 5 bucks . . . but  
you still get all of the support load for those additional 1000 users  
as well as the discounted upgrades (assuming that a particular  
developer does discounted upgrades and that the MacHeist purchasers  
actually upgrade.

Now each developer made their own economic analysis of course . . .  
and I can't fault any of them for participating or not . . . but for  
the guy who did the least amount of work (the MacHeist guys) to take  
the vast majority of the profit just seems to fly in the face of  
maintaining a healthy shareware development community.

Personally; I would rather support those developers whose software I  
want to use.

There was actually a pretty lengthy selection of this on several of  
the lists I participate in . . .with some good arguments made on both  
sides.