"pricing" entries

Four short links: 26 April 2016

Four short links: 26 April 2016

Driverless Trucks, Say No, Pricing Truths, and Task Worker Stats

  1. Driverless Trucking Numbers (TechCrunch) — $4.5k to truck something across country, 75% of which is labour. Trucks most fuel-efficient at 45mph but drivers are paid by the hour and their hours capped at 11/day. More truck drivers killed on the job than any other occupation. Truck drivers are 1% of the workforce, and it’s the most common job in 29 states. And more “gosh this is gonna be interesting” numbers.
  2. Email Isn’t the Problem — Glyph nails it. The thing you are bad at is saying ‘no’ to people. The downside of lauding 20 year olds in tech is that they build software for other 20 year olds: software that creates noise, distraction, opportunity. When you are doing what you want to do, though, that same software inhibits your ability to do it. All we have is poorly-evolved meat to fight the wily silicon ….
  3. Terrible Truths of Pricing — The first rule of pricing is that you don’t talk about pricing. What he says might be true, but the absence of any question of morality around pricing drugs (which he tackles outright) makes me grumble “price of everything and value of nothing”.
  4. The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015 (PDF) — Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or Task Rabbit, accounted for 0.5 percent of all workers in 2015. About twice as many workers selling goods or services directly to customers reported finding customers through offline intermediaries than through online intermediaries.

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Strata Week: Unfortunately for some, Uber's dynamic pricing worked

Dynamic pricing angers some Uber users, Hadoop hits 1.0, a possible set back for open-access research.

Uber's dynamic pricing worked as intended on New Year's Eve, but not everyone is happy about that. Elsewhere, Hadoop reaches the 1.0 milestone and proposed legislation seeks to repeal an open-access research policy.

Ebook pricing power is undermined by perceived value

Wide ranging ebook pricing and deep print book discounts leave consumers scratching their heads.

BizBookLab owner Todd Sattersten discusses the issues surrounding ebook pricing and perceived value, and he suggests it might be time to bring back the serial novel.

Piracy isn't just about price

A piracy research report makes a strong point about pricing, but results may be too narrow.

The "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies" report offers good insight about the realities of pricing, but the "Don't Make Me Steal" manifesto offers a broader perspective on why people pirate digital content.

The power of promotional pricing

We've been running an ebook "$9.99 deal of the day" promotion for some time now, and customer response has been quite positive. There's also some very interesting sales data coming out of these promotions. It's no surprise that promotional pricing increases sales; the balancing act is in making sure that overall revenue increases (offsetting the per-unit revenue decrease) as well…

Actually, half of all iPad Books are Fiction

Suggestions to my previous post inspired me to normalize our metadata1 for titles available through the U.S. iBooks app. A comment prompted me to rollup iBooks publishers into publishing conglomerates2: Comments from other readers gave me the idea to map the 100+ iBooks categories to the more familiar BISAC categories. Doing so means over half of all iBooks titles are…

Cookbooks: The highest priced iPad book category

Just like the iTunes app store, the iBooks app on the iPad spotlights the Top Paid (and Top Free) books within each category. Here are some charts that compare the average price (by rank)1 across the major categories. The average price of the Top 50 titles across the major categories range from $7-$15. Cookbooks, History, Biographies are slightly higher priced,…

Games & Entertaiment account for half of all iPad apps

98% of apps in the U.S. iTunes app store label themselves as "iPad compatible", but most were written for iPhones or iPods. One week into its launch there are about 2,300 apps that run only on iPads. Measured in terms of number of unique apps, Games and Entertainment account for about half of all the iPad apps.

Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive

In an earlier post, I examined the average price of the Top 100 PAID apps and noted that the relationship between price and popularity was somewhat dependent on the category. But in the Book category, I concluded that the Top 10 PAID apps were on average cheaper than those ranked 91-100. But what if we examine all Book apps, will the long tail apps be pricier?

"E pluribus tunum: Uniform prices for online music are no way to maximise profit"

This research suggest maximum value in a digital media market like iTunes (for both producer and consumer) comes from a combination of subscription/membership fee and per-item purchase: "Charging an "entry fee" for use of the service and then a small, fixed per-song cost for downloads turned out to benefit both the seller and the buyer. The most revenue, according to…