How Online Companies Get You To Share More & Spend More | Hacker News Reader

How Online Companies Get You To Share More & Spend More

wired.com

42 pointsjoelrunyon9 comments

I'm surprised they talked about Zynga but didn't touch upon the model of "Free + Microtransactions", which has been all the rage in Korea/China for several years and is definitely on the rise in the United States. That seems to be the real "spend more" part.

The remarkable thing about Farmville isn't merely about people spending more time to play the game once they're time-invested, but more-so about getting people to willingly spend real dollar bills on a game that is free once they are at a certain point of time-investedness.

I hesitate to invoke a comic to illustrate a point, but I think this one fits quite nicely:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/6/10/

I think they're interconnected. Once people feel like they're "time-invested" in a game, they're much more willing to be financially invested in the game. The time investment warms them up and turns them into prospects much more willing to spend real money on the game they're already heavily invested in with their time.

How are they getting us to "share more", as the title says?

The last three examples, Zynga, Groupon and Facebook all have instances where users are rewarded or incentivized to share more.

Or how psychology and behavioral economics professors get you to buy more of their books.

Meh. Amazon's services are _good value_; there's nothing particularly psychological (read: manipulative) about providing something people want.

Given that we have to buy stuff, it turns out that paying 80 bucks a year for 2-day shipping is really worth it.

There's a popular 'narrative' about psychology 'exploiting' us, when a lot of these mechanisms are just completely fair methods of exchanging value in cash for value in product.

I think that part was more about eliminating small frictions. It would be much more difficult for Amazon to convince you to pay for 2-day shipping on every transaction, but by offering you Prime, they're eliminating the small frictions to keep you from paying them extra on top of your other order and still extracting another purchase out of you.

The article wasn't discussing whether or not it was a "good value", it was discussing how Amazon makes you spend more, which it does.

What confuses me is that where I live (Germany) packages usually arrive within 2 days anyway, yet Amazon still tries to sell that premium package. I even know somebody who bought it. Why?

You'll have to ask your friend, but if Amazon can sell something for $80, you can bet they'll sell it to whoever wants to buy it...regardless of whether or not it makes logistical sense to do so.

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