CrystalGames posted at 12:17PM Wed, 13 January 2016 - #4248757

basicwiz posted at 2:35PM Tue, 12 January 2016 - #4248748 ...

The problem with freebies is that the number of downloads mean nothing in terms of market research.

Sure, lots of people download it - for some day. We have lots of hoarders.

Additionally, what people say they will buy on the forum has no relationship to what they actually pull the credit card out for. Yeah, they love you when you're handing out free stuff, but it's an entirely different conversation when it comes time to pay up.

Market "research" based on freebies isn't research at all.

Actually this isn't even close to correct.

There is plenty of valuable market based information that can be gleaned from the freebies section here. The best forms of market research take information from a variety of sources and conglomerate them to provide a bigger picture to answer questions. Accuracy is reliant on volume of information compared to desired error tolerance levels and weighting information to account for possible bias in the data.{1}

Here is a simple example of using the freebies section to gather information which could be used in market research.

Looking at the What's New page 1 which contains 48 items.

Software supported by these items: Daz Studio Only - 13 items Poser Only - 16 . Dual Poser and Daz - 11. Bryce - 1. Unknown, OBJ or 2D - 8.

This tells us that out of the most recent products uploaded to Renderosity freebies section that 27% of items uploaded are DS specific support. 33% offer Poser specific support. And that 22% of items are Dual DS and Poser. So Daz Studio and Poser items make up nearly 80% of these freebies. Which would indicate in this situation that DS and Poser are the major platforms based on that data.

These observations could be added to other research to answer questions like, what are the markets segment sizes for each platform, what are the major platforms in use etc. Other things you could look at are what percentages are trending or hot in comparison to the percentage submitted across platform supported. Comparing the actual amount of downloads across each different item compared to supported platform base, which may yield results into estimated numbers of people downloading for each platform and provide information regarding estimated market sizes for each platform.

The accuracy of the observations is improved by the more data that is correlated, so if you took 5 pages of nearly 250 items, the resulting statistics are more accurate than if you took only look at one page. Though most market research is taken on a sample group with a predictable and acceptable error margin that can be as low as 1% of a total known volume{2}

Considering additional sources to add further contributing data would further validate any conclusions drawn and help to eliminate source bias or contamination of the statistics. {3}

Though I do agree with:

Additionally, what people say they will buy on the forum has no relationship to what they actually pull the credit card out for. Yeah, they love you when you're handing out free stuff, but it's an entirely different conversation when it comes time to pay up.