Entrepreneurs, take note: here's how to promote a product. I'd never heard of Codeweavers before this. Imagine all the Digg & newsmedia coverage they're getting.
When you're running Linux as your desktop, it's impossible to not hear about them.
Their product is based on Wine, which is a pretty decent emulation of the Windows APIs, but it is a bitch to setup properly, so you start looking around for more professional solutions.
CodeWeavers, besides their own contributions to Wine, have the advantage that they test their setup against popular software.
I told my friend shortly thereafter (sorry, should have also submitted it to HN in hindsight), who then looked at the site and product features/comparison and costs(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/), and for the last several hours has been building up a huge repository of serials.
Asking him what he intends to do with all the licenses, he replied "they come with full technical support from the company, so I will ebay each for $1, build up a fantastic ebay profile to market my other products and make $$$".
Most of this is done automatically, from harvesting the serials to automated auction listing and delivery, but none the less it seems extreme to me.
BUT, I guess, that is what being opportunistic and exploiting all the verticals is about. :-/
You can do this sort of thing regularly through sites like giveawayoftheday.com
Long-term results are mixed and (as henning notes) this sort of stunt does not attract the type of customer a business wants (that is, those willing to spend money on quality software).
Bogging down your support staff with a bunch of cheapskates looking for freebies can increase costs while doing squat for revenue, all while seriously cheezing off those of your customers who actually paid for your product.
If you're new and you're desperate, go for it. Otherwise, you might want to consider a different advertising strategy.
This is more than just a giveaway, though, because:
1.) He tied it in with the current presidential election
2.) He framed it as a challenge with a lot of chutzah (really, running CodeWeaver is nowhere near as complicated as running the U.S.)
3.) The reason he "lost" has to do with a current event (the economic crisis) that has nothing to do with the original challenge (Bush didn't lower gas prices, the crude market did).
4.) The press release had a funny, irreverent tone.
That seems tailor-made for a viral story. It's not that they were giving things away, it was that they were giving things away and relating them to current events in an offbeat way.
I have no idea. But say they get 1,000,000 visitors from this stunt, none of whom had ever heard of CodeWeavers before and none of whom will ever pay for another CodeWeavers product again (the folks who read Digg/Reddit/blogs tend not to pay for software ;-)). Then say that each of them tells 5 other people - that seems reasonable based on who I've told, and amounts to 5M people who know about CodeWeavers and didn't before. Then assume a 1% conversion rate. That's 50,000 new customers, and at $40/copy, $2M in additional revenue. Not bad for a publicity stunt.
The problem with Digg traffic is it's garbage. The conversion rate is almost zero. It's not high-quality views. It's like showing ads to college students on Facebook: you're getting tons of eyeballs but the eyeballs spend what little money they have on ring tones and beer.
But, I've never done any real Internet marketing stuff so I don't speak from firsthand experience.
Right, you don't count on Digg to generate conversions or repeat views or anything like that, because almost by definition, they're the sort of people that flit from news story to news story and never go deep into anything.
However, they're also the type of people that like to tell people about their great discoveries on Digg. The Mavens, on Gladwell's Tipping Point adoption curve. They don't spend money, and promptly lose interest a day later, but one of the people they tell may start using your product or telling people.
When we first launched Diffle, we put a game up on Digg to gauge response. We got about 1200 visits off that. Of those, 6 came back later. But one of those 6 must've told their friends, because 6 months later, we were back up at about 1200 visits/month with no additional publicity. (And there it stayed because the site sucked, but that's another issue.)
Your right. I think you need to make a distinction here.
Someone searching for 'stylish coffee machine' on Google is maybe 1% or 2% of selling a coffee machine to given a good product offering & e commerce experience. A digg visitor checking out this super stylish appliance is maybe a 0.1% chance. probably not even that. (same applies for chance of becoming a regular reader or app user or whatever).
This leads people to post a lot about how useless digg traffic is. But that's not entirely true. It has other uses. As nostrademons mentions, they are talkers. they are also bloggers & linkers, commentors on other blogs etc. If someone else brings up the topic, they jump in.
Different types of sites/apps/etc. have different channels that work for them. Digg may be useful in helping some of these along.
A secondary use is validation. Someone's already got a Google Office Account. They copy paste a piece of their spreadsheet on to it every month to share with 3-4 people. They then read a digg on how awesome Google Office is & how this blogger is ditching MS altogether. maybe this'll push them to write up their next proposal on G! Docs. etc. etc.
It's not 'conversion' traffic. But it still might be useful.
I'm still on the fence about CodeWeavers. A few great points have been made about the software which makes Windows emulation much, much easier but at the same time, their original code base came entirely from Wine; there's no GPL requirement to make it free, I kinda take the idea of using free code for profit as kind of a tightwad move.
But, they're free to do what they want with it, and this was not a bad move to at least give back to those who really jumped on the chance.
Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back to the community (ie: Wine's git tree) - and a few of the main Wine hackers are employed by Codeweavers (Alexandre and Jeremy at least).
Games came out later. If I remember correctly it was released as more of a stop-gap version to get games-specific fixes out sooner than the regular release cycle.
* The difference with regular CrossOver is that CrossOver Games will have a shorter release cycle in order to update faster to the latest work on Wine than with regular CrossOver, which targets stability and reliability.
* Crossover Mac was divided into Standard and Pro versions like Crossover Linux. The standard version includes 6 months of support and upgrades, while the Pro version includes 1 year of support and upgrades and a free copy of Crossover Games.
"Word from CodeWeavers execs is that the free license will be for a download-only flavor of the Pro version (!), including the Games optimized build and the option to share a Windows 'bottle' among multiple users on the same machine."
I have a favorite game which has very poor support under Wine. The CodeWeavers product may very well do a better job with it. If so, I can switch my personal box full-time to Linux. That would make me very happy.
