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Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
Screensavers and Wallpapers
Wallpaper is an ideal thing to offer as a download: it's
popular, replaced often, and doesn't need you to host
prohibitively large files. Unfortunately, the most popular kinds
of wallpaper show characters and images that you're unlikely to
be able to get a license to use, but, luckily, you can still
create good wallpaper using nothing but geometric shapes and
interesting colours.
Any artist worth their salt should be able to fire up Photoshop
and produce quite a few very appealing wallpaper-sized images
for very little money: it's just not that difficult, if you know
what you're doing. However, you do need to remember that you'll
have to offer each wallpaper in different sizes for different
screen resolutions (so one for 800x600, one for 1024x768, and so
on), which can be troublesome. Wallpaper should generally be one
part of a site rather than the only thing the site does.
The same thing goes for screensavers. Screensavers are harder to
produce than wallpapers, but they have the advantage that the
user is likely to spend longer looking at them. If you get an
artist to create them using Flash, you should have a relatively
easy time. Don't be tempted, though, to have screensavers made
that simply consist of the same animation looped over and over
again.
What makes a good screensaver, then? The answer is that it
should be either useful or interesting, and it must be one of
these things for longer than five minutes. An ideal screensaver
is one that provides useful information from your website that a
user is likely to need every day - but, if you're just going for
interesting, you can do something as simple as using
randomisation and mathematical equations to produce different
patterns every time the screensaver is started. For some ideas,
take a look at the screensavers that come with Windows.
Demos and Trailers
Demos of software and games and trailers for films are very
popular items on the web, with literally millions of people
searching for the latest ones every day. Even better, because
they essentially serve as marketing for the companies that
produce them, they're typically freely redistributable by anyone
who has the bandwidth and the inclination.
In that case, why isn't everyone offering demos and trailers to
their visitors? The answer is bandwidth costs. An average
trailer or demo can be anywhere from ten megabytes to about
fifty - multiply that by thousands of visitors per day, and then
see how many gigabytes of transfer you'd need per month. It adds
up fast.
How can you solve this problem? Well, you can try to pay for the
bandwidth using advertising, but you're unlikely to make a
profit that way, unless you bombard the viewer with ads to the
point where they'll just want to escape. Realistically, the only
way to make a profit on high-bandwidth items is to use the queue
ruse: that is, force people who want to download to wait in a
queue for a set length of time, and offer them a button that
lets them jump the queue for a relatively small amount of money.
You'd be surprised just how many people will click that button -
the cost of a gigabyte of bandwidth will easily repay itself
five times over. Many gaming sites sell monthly subscriptions
that get visitors nothing more than downloads of demos, and they
do well out of it.
The queue approach will, however, have the effect of reducing
your site's popularity, as many people will just leave instead
of waiting or paying. This is the paradox of free downloads:
offering them out there completely for free will get you
thousands upon thousands of visitors, but you'll be losing money
on it because of the bandwidth costs. I'll leave this as a
problem for you to solve, but I would suggest that you could do
well out of it if you had a related business of your own to
advertise, instead of just taking a cut of external advertisers'
profits.
About the author:
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.