Anyone know where I can get hold of useful stats on % of users who upgrade to premium/paid for accounts on services like Flickr and Last.fm.<p>Need some decent stats for benchmarking and have had no luck getting anything of use.<p>Thanks.
Google for SXSW Webapp Autopsy. (Oh, heck, I'll do it for you. <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_web_app_autopsy.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_web_app_autopsy.ph...</a> ) There is a lot of good in there.<p>Personally I think the data is of limited use even for benchmarking but, eh, your funeral. Users of my downloadable app convert to the paid version at about 1.8%~2.2% most months. There is a bit of guesswork involved there as counting downloads is not quite as reliable as "select count(*) from accounts;" .
One link I can give is <a href="http://nabeel.typepad.com/brinking/2008/09/theres-been-som.html" rel="nofollow">http://nabeel.typepad.com/brinking/2008/09/theres-been-som.h...</a><p>Overall, Freemium conversion rates are way down right now. I might suspect that users are feeling less wealthy, and not opting to pay for anything that's not absolutely necessary.
You can't really compare yourself to those guys. Sure they might have ~2% conversion rates...but thats because their users trust that they pay for quality, You on the other hand will be an unknown, so they'll be more hesitant to give up the credit card info. To be on the safe side, put your conversion rate at .5%.
Ryan Carson shared stats for DropSend a couple of years ago on Vitamin: <a href="http://thinkvitamin.com/business/will-your-web-app-make-money/" rel="nofollow">http://thinkvitamin.com/business/will-your-web-app-make-mone...</a>
To cheer things a bit, here are some higher numbers:<p>Flickr: 5-10%
Ning: 3%
Online free-to-play games: up to 25%
TurboTax Online: 70% (!!)<p>Source: <a href="http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-...</a><p>My opinion: it depends on a lot of factors. From my experience without much effort you can get 1% users convert. But like I said there a lot of variables that can mess it up or down.
Don Dodge from Microsoft had this post a long time ago: <a href="http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/freemium_free_t.html" rel="nofollow">http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/freem...</a><p>Money quote: "The average is less than 3% conversion."