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Back when my company was using our analytics to track piracy for iPhone applications, we found that 1 out of 243 people who stole an application later installed a legitimate copy.

We stopped tracking piracy when we realized that we were getting into a cat-and-mouse game with application pirates and the feature wasn't worth the resources, but I can't imagine these stats have changed much since.



And how many of those people would have bought the application if it wasn't available to pirate? I'm guessing it would still be a much smaller number. There's a massive gap between being able to get something for completely free and having to pay for it.


Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.


While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.


It brings more to the table than the hand-waving that I see all over piracy discussions. And I don't see how you connect the parent's post with your freemium discussion - he made no such conclusions from his data.


It's true, he didn't. But I've seen others draw the same conclusion from similar data before, so just pointing out that fallacy ahead of time.




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