Oh man, a lot of us in the industry were unfairly hard on the Pixelmator team when they announced that they would be moving their entire sales system to the Mac App Store. We complained about having to eventually pay twice for the app, we complained about losing support, and generally, we complained a lot.
Pixelmator isn’t complaining all that much today. They’ve just announced on their blog that they’ve managed to sell $1 million worth of Pixelmator on the Mac App Store. If you’re struggling with the numbers, Pixelmator has sold approximately 33,344 copies of their application in 20 days. That’s a pretty huge feat for a company that was taking a huge gamble by moving their application entirely to the Mac App Store. It looks like the Pixelmator team made the right choice. It only took them 20 days to sell a million dollars in software.
Pixelmator’s success really starts to answer the questions about Apple’s infamous 30% cut with each Mac App Store purchase. It seems, for most at least, that the 30% cut is worth it. If a 30% cut means getting your application in front millions of OS X users, most of who would have generally passed by your application previously online, it’s a trade-off worth making.
Detractors would argue that the success was based on being ready for the Mac App Store launch with a severely discounted price for the application. While basic economics would argue that to be the case to some extent, there’s no doubt now that a market place for desktop software is a positive thing for consumers and developers. Getting customers in front of great applications is something that has previously been a problem on the internet. The Mac App Store really takes a stab at solving that problem. It appears that Apple’s solving the problem in ways that most could have only imagined.
What I’d like to know is how many of those people previously owned a copy of Pixelmator, and how many of them were completely new customers. I don’t think there’s any metric available that would give the Pixelmator team an idea, but it sure would be interesting to know.
Update: Jonathan Kressaty pointed out on Twitter that Pixelmator held the much-coveted front ad spot on the Mac App Store for three weeks. That certainly would have helped sales to some degree as well.
Article Via The Pixelmator Blog
