On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 6:40 AM, David Kirkby <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm willing to donate £30.00 ($48) of my own money to target > Mathematica, so when people search for it, they get ads for Sage on > Google. That might not be enough to make any impact, but it's worth a > try. > > 1) First, does anyone object to me doing this, or have any opinions > why its a bad idea? > 2) Secondly, would anyone object if William donated some money from > Sage donations or other sources of income? I'm not suggesting William > should do that, but he did wonder on another thread (Support > contracts for commercial customers) if people might object to money > being spent on advertising.
I'm fine with spending a bit of money on advertising, but it does seem odd to me to particularly single out a competitor. Terms like "math software" could be useful. > Next question, how does one target languages and regions? According to > Google trends, taking only the last 12 months > > http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=mathematica&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 > > for search terms, > > 1) The most common search region is Greece > 2) The most common search city is Cambridge, MA, USA. > 3) The most common search language is Greek > > I must admit, the first and third surprise me a bit. Mathematica could be something else in Greece or Greek. For example, http://www.mathematica.gr/ doesn't seem to be owned by Wolfram. > One thing that I did consider is that in some countries, where > software piracy is very common, the idea of saving money by using Sage > rather than Mathematica might not be much incentive. > > I've no idea of the accuracy of this data, but > > http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate > > ranks Armenia as the #1 country for piracy at 93%, Greece at #60 with > 58%, the UK (where I live) at #27 with 26% and the USA at #107 with > 20%. I can well believe 26% in the UK, as that figure probably > includes games, but I think it will be a lot lower for professional > software like Mathematica. I think one criteria would be to try to attract those users that we can serve best. A whole new influx of, say, interest from Greece would be hard if no one in the community speeks any Greek. > One can either pay for a click or pay by the number of ads seen. I'd rather pay by click. > Any thoughts on the best way to target this? Take a look at > http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/adwords/jumpstart/09Q3-new.html to see > the options. Creating the account is free, though there's a $5 one-off > fee for actually taking out the ads. You can read a lot more, and > experiment with keywords once you have an account. > > I suspect it needs more than £30 ($48) to make any serious impact, but > it would be interesting to see what happens. I believe Harald Schilly did some experiments along these lines a year or two ago. Might be interesting to see what was learned there. - Robert -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
