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Comment by benplumley | Hacker News Reader

Careful, this sounds like the 1% fallacy - just because 1% sounds like a small number doesn't make it an easy target.

http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-falla...

Obviously building a service and thinking you will get 1% of users to support it may be prone to this fallacy and thus a service should not necessarily be built on this assumption, but in this case they have already sunk the costs of building the service, now it's sending the email to find out if 1% will support it.

I don't think there is a lot of reason to be careful in this case.

This is a very clearly written article. Business focused without the bs lingo. I like that kind of thing, because it gets me thinking about stuff instead of feeling stupid when stepping outside of my expertise.

That article isn't applicable, as it's discussing 1% of a total market, whereas the discussion at hand is about 1% of the site's current userbase.

It's still relevant. There are still numbers lower than 1%. Less than 1% of viewers will upvote/downvote a video they watched, which is much easier (and less expensive) than paying.

No, it's not relevant, because they are discussing completely different conversion metrics and at different scales. Also, your insistence that less than 1% of viewers will interact is based on the mistaken assumption that 100% of reported views represent someone who actually watched. Real life doesn't work like analytics.

About 1% of the people shown an ad (or any content) will even consciously acknowledge it, while approximately 1-3% of the remaining 1% will interact with it, and then 1-5% of that remaining group will actually buy the product. The 99% who didn't acknowledge its existence in the first place don't actually factor into anything other than how much you get charged for the ad.

The difference between the article and the OP's scenario, is that the OP already filtered the 99% and converted the rest. Now there is only one conversion left, which is to make them into paying customers, which is a much higher rate than 1% when you already have a captive audience.

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