Posted By Paul Kafasis on August 8th, 2006

Sales numbers change on the weekend for almost any type of business. Plenty of places are closed on Sundays, limiting their sales. Others have weekend rushes, such as movie theaters, restaurants and bars. However, here at Rogue Amoeba we’ve seen something odd as far as sales numbers go that’s worth discussing.

To the left, you can see (once you click to enlarge) four simple pie charts. The first shows what the chart looks like when sales are flat across the week. That is, if you have identical sales across every day, you’d get ~29% of your sales on the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) and ~71% of them during the week (Monday through Friday).

Nicecast matches this standard exactly – we sell the same average number of Nicecast licenses, regardless of the day. Audio Hijack Pro is close at 70% Weekday sales and 30% Weekend sales, as is Audio Hijack at 69% Weekday sales and 31% Weekend sales.

These numbers are affected by our habit of releasing updates on Monday through Wednesday, so really, all of these applications have even sales across the week. That in and of itself is interesting, as I’d expect to see at least some surge in sales over the weekend, when potential customers have more time to evaluate the software. However, it appears that sales of Nicecast, Audio Hijack Pro, and Audio Hijack are independent of the day of the week.

However, as you can see here, Airfoil doesn’t match this standard at all. Airfoil doesn’t just sell a bit better on weekends than weekdays. Instead, sales from Saturday and Sunday total out to more than sales from Monday through Friday combined. These additional sales caught our eye while examining our sales data, because they caused total per-day sales to increase. Consequently, our sales charts showed big jumps for the weekend that stuck out quite a bit.

So, what’s the explanation for Airfoil selling so much better on the weekends? We’ll likely never be sure, but we have a few theories. Airfoil does require time at home to evaluate. While some or even many users may have access to a Macintosh at work, very few will have an AirPort Express to test with. As well, Airfoil is a product to be used while listening to audio live, something that seems much more likely to be a weekend activity. Conversely, Audio Hijack and Audio Hijack Pro can be used live or set up to run automatically, meaning they can be tested at any time.

We’re not really sure what to do with this knowledge. For now, it’s merely an interesting bit of information which makes the weekends even more enjoyable and Mondays (and their associated sales drop) even more detestable. But we’re also working on a new calendar system, consisting only of weekends. It’s gonna be totally sweet.

Title Of Post
The quote that serves as the title of this post is by the incomparable Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. If you didn’t know, Bill looks exactly like a real-world version of Calvin’s dad.