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This math could work, but there are also other aspect to consider.

1. It assumes that they did not recieve more visitors, which is hard to believe that this could be the case here. If the number of visitors double, the sale is the same.

2. More customers means, more support expense, but it also means more revenue in the future from antivirus renewal and software upgrades.

3. Usually you need to spend significant amount to 6x increase the traffic. So this is trade off for marketing expense.

Honestly, As a user I prefer when vendor give their "sales" away, vs. spend their money on advertisement. It seems to be a nice guesture.

I have some doubt that this could be a good long term strategy, but it seems as perfect short term promotion. I hope other software vendor will do it, too.

Their conversion rate was up 6x, but their average selling price was down over 10x. This new business model gives them 6x as many customers to support at half the revenue of the original model.

[jim@mb ~]$ cat x.py
for v in [10,100,1000]:
print "For %d visitors:" % v
print " Old buyers:", .01*v, "revenue", .01*v*40
print " New buyers:", .06*v, "revenue", .06*v*3.32
[jim@mb ~]$ python x.py
For 10 visitors:
Old buyers: 0.1 revenue 4.0
New buyers: 0.6 revenue 1.992
For 100 visitors:
Old buyers: 1.0 revenue 40.0
New buyers: 6.0 revenue 19.92
For 1000 visitors:
Old buyers: 10.0 revenue 400.0
New buyers: 60.0 revenue 199.2

I'd rather make twice as much money with 6x fewer customers.

Here is a link to complete "Pay What You Want" expirwment wrap up.

http://www.binarynow.com/office-suite/pay-what-you-want-experiment-wrap-up/