Hey David, we’re delighted to answer these kinds of questions and share data.
We’re an Open Company after all: Directory of Member Companies - Open Company Initiative 
The pie charts at Intrafamily Bets and the Genius of the Exponential Pledge Schedule | Beeminder Blog may answer
your question about the breakdown by pledges. It’s harder to quote
statistics about success vs failure because most goals are open-ended.
As for why most revenue is from pledges, well, sadly only 138 people
are premium (thanks so much for being one of them!). Per-user revenue
is higher for premium than pledges so, yes, we’d be happy to induce
more people to sign up instead of raising the prices. But our best
idea so far is to induce people to sign up by raising prices. And
then there are all the other ideas in this thread for new premium
features or existing non-premium features to make premium. But that’s
not top priority yet. If the price hike gets lots of people to sign up
and then the higher prices reduce signups then we’ll work on more
inducements (we won’t lower the prices again – we’re just accepting
the small risk that the new prices will be too high).
PS: Good arguments against privacy-as-premium-feature, from all of
you. At first I struck it from the list but still thought y’all were
wrong. Now it’s stricken from the list and I think you’re right!
(But to answer your parenthetical, there are lots of people who get
massive value out of Beeminder without ever paying, often because the
threat of paying is super motivating, so it would be great to convince
them that they should really be premium. But currently we don’t have a
way to do that and I’m ok with that for now.)
On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 1:18 AM, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com wrote:
On 12 July 2014 01:45, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:
Right now premium revenue is 10% of pledge revenue which is why this
whole question is not exactly top priority. But we want to try this
price hike and see if premium revenue has potential to eventually
become our primary revenue source. We might prefer that.Out of curiousity, is that because people have high value pledges with high
failure rates, or is it because most of your users aren’t premium? If the
latter, would it be better to see if you could encourage people to upgrade
to premium rather than raise the prices?In general it would be super interesting to see some aggregated breakdowns
of how people use beeminder. In particular I’d love to know typical failure
rates by pledge value. Totally understood if you don’t feel comfortable
sharing that though.The initial impetus was simply “can we induce more people to go
premium by announcing an imminent price hike?”
We will keep you all posted on the answer!Well it worked to get me to upgrade to a higher rate premium anyway.
Though that was more because it made me think about the value I was getting
out of beeminder than because I wanted to avoid paying the higher price
later.
–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com