Zero Was Allowed in the Price Box
One seller switched all seven of his digital products to "pay what you want" for a month. The minimum was zero dollars, and only the suggested price, a few dollars, was filled in. Thirty days later the dashboard showed this:
- People who opened a product page: 540
- People who took a product home: 34
- Total paid by all of them: $36.98
Miroslav Novohradsky, who wrote up the experiment on Design Nexus, describes a revenue line that lay flat along the bottom for almost the whole month and jumped exactly three times. Most people typed a zero; he puts it at roughly nine in ten. This article uses that month as a starting point to look at where pay what you want (PWYW) is useful and where it behaves differently from what people expect.
A caveat first. These numbers are one seller's self-report from one shop over one month. They are not independently verified, and they are not profit. Marketplace fees, payment fees, and production time are not in the figures. The article also does not say much about what the seven products were or where the traffic came from. So this piece does not turn the month into a rule.
An empty glass jar with a few coins, an unmarked price tag, and a paper bag on a wooden counterView original
Dividing the numbers
Here is some simple arithmetic on the author's figures. The calculation is mine; it is not in the original.
34 of 540 visitors took a product, about 6.3%. $36.98 divided by 34 is about $1.09. But the author says money arrived on only three days, so $1.09 is an average per person who took a file, not per person who paid. How many people actually paid cannot be read from the article.
Two things stand out. First, the visit-to-download rate is in the single digits. With the price at zero, more than nine in ten visitors still left without a file. If price was not the barrier, the drop-off may come from the product description, the first screen, the traffic source, or the product itself. Second, people who paid received exactly the same file as people who did not. The author says this keeps rattling around in his head. Nothing changed with the amount, yet a few people still paid. His guess is that they paid for how it feels to be someone who pays for things. That is a guess, not an established fact.
Tweaking changed nothing, which is its own finding
Midway through the month, with views climbing and money flat, the author rewrote the description, added a line about how many hours a product took to make, and nudged the suggested price up and down. The revenue line did not move. The three days that did bring money were all days when he had stopped thinking about the shop.
I do not read this as "stop looking and it sells." The author himself says it is probably chance. One practical point is worth keeping, though. To know whether a small edit to a description or a suggested price changes anything under PWYW, you need a sample. A shop where 34 people take a file in a month cannot show the effect of a copy change. If you change something and watch for a day or two, it is easy to mistake luck for a result.
The same shape, seen earlier: Radiohead's In Rainbows
The best-known use of pay what you want is Radiohead's 2007 release of In Rainbows. The band let fans choose the price of the digital download, and the research firm comScore published measurements in a press release dated November 5, 2007, covering October 1 to 29.
- Of people who started a download, 38% paid and 62% paid nothing.
- Among those who paid, the average was $6.00.
- Averaged over all downloads, including free ones, it was $2.26.
- People who paid $8 to $12 were 12% of downloaders but contributed 52% of the dollars.
- People who paid $0.01 to $4 were 17% of downloaders and 8% of the dollars.
These are estimates from comScore's panel of 2 million people who gave permission to be monitored, and the release says the dollar figures exclude credit card fees. Radiohead disputed the data. According to comScore's own blog, Thom Yorke later said in an interview that the free share was "about 50%." comScore argued that it counted started downloads while the band probably counted completed ones, and read the two figures as consistent. That reading is comScore's position.
Put the two cases side by side and a common shape appears. In the famous band's case, roughly half to 62% chose zero, according to the sources. In the unknown seller's shop, about 90% did, by his own count. The scales and products are so different that 90% and 62% cannot be compared directly. Still, the direction is the same in both: when zero is allowed, most people choose zero.
What is more interesting is where the money came from. In In Rainbows, a smaller group paid larger amounts, and that group produced more than half the dollars. An average hides this. A PWYW average is the sum of "mostly zero, some people quite a lot," so a plan built on the average price will miss.
Three stacks of index cards in different heights lined up on a wooden deskView original
Why it looks more like a lead tool than a revenue model
From here on this is my interpretation. Neither the article nor the comScore data says it directly.
A plan to earn through PWYW has two weak points. First, income depends on the mood of a few people and is hard to forecast. This method cannot tell you whether a month will bring $36.98 or $360. Second, if nothing records who took the file, the large majority who paid nothing simply disappear.
Read as a lead tool, the same numbers look different. If 540 people opened the page and 34 took a file, then 34 people experienced your work. If you have a way to tell those 34 about the next product, the zero-dollar download has a purpose. If you do not, nothing happens. So before turning PWYW on, I would settle at least three things.
1. Write down in one sentence what the free download is for. For example: "collect an email address," "introduce a paid upper-tier product," or "gather reviews." Without a purpose, zero is just free distribution.
2. Put a fixed-price product on the same page or the next screen. PWYW hands the price anchor to the customer. Some products need that, but with a fixed tier from the start the customer does not have to work out "what is fair," only "do I want this." That the $8 to $12 band took more than half the dollars in the In Rainbows data suggests such a tier is possible to design around. It is a hint, not evidence that it works for other products.
3. Measure visit-to-download conversion separately. The step from 540 to 34 is the number to look at before revenue. If that step is narrow, check the hero image, the first two lines of the description, and the traffic source before changing the price.
Zero-dollar downloads still cost something
A file that goes out for free is not free to run. Depending on the platform, free downloads can carry fees or monthly charges. Someone who takes the file may send a question, and answering takes time. Fixing a broken file and re-uploading it takes time too. I am stating this as general reasoning; the article gives no figures for it. Unless the seller records how much time each product actually consumes, there is no way to say whether $36.98 is a lot or a little.
A short checklist:
- Add up the time spent per product on making, fixing, and answering over the month.
- Write down the money received after payment and platform fees, separately from the gross.
- Count free downloads and paid purchases separately.
- Count how many downloaders took a next step: subscribing, buying again, or asking a question.
With those four lines, "540, 34, $36.98" can be told apart as either a shop's result or a small audience gained without ad spend.
Where pay what you want fits
My judgment is that it is worth trying when:
- The product already exists and extra production cost is close to nothing.
- There is a way to get a downloader's contact details.
- There is a higher-tier product or service to offer later.
- You want something other than immediate revenue, such as reviews, subscribers, or trust.
If the product was expensive to make, if you need a fixed income soon, or if you have no way to reach downloaders again, the method is unlikely to give the return you hoped for. The author himself says it did not make money worth talking about and did not reveal a secret crowd of generous fans. He is keeping the zero option because he would rather see an honest number.
A small experiment for this week
If you already run PWYW, or plan to, this order is realistic.
- Record page visits, downloads, and paid orders for the last 30 days, one line each.
- Write in one sentence what the zero-dollar download was meant to achieve.
- Put one next action on the download-complete screen. Choose one: an email signup or a link to a higher-tier product.
- Put one fixed-price product on the same page and compare the split between the two choices for two weeks.
- Leave the copy and the price alone for those two weeks. Change one thing at a time and record it.
This experiment does not guarantee income. It will tell you why 540 became 34 and where those 34 went. With pay what you want, those two answers are worth more than the revenue.
Sources: Miroslav Novohradsky
