From Free to Paid: Monetizing a Non-Advertising-Based App
通过大规模随机现场实验，研究了非广告型应用在变现时定价策略（硬着陆与软着陆）和产品设计（是否提供专属附加服务）对用户订阅意愿的影响，发现软着陆和专属附加服务均降低订阅意愿，但两者存在正向交互作用。
Non-advertising-based mobile apps face several critical challenges when trying to monetize their free services—among them, the choice of pricing strategies (hard landing vs. soft landing; i.e., a “pay or churn” paywall vs. continuing to offer limited free services to existing users after monetization) and aspects of product design (whether to provide exclusive secondary offerings to paying users). The authors implemented a large-scale randomized field experiment with an app firm to test the causal effects of such pricing and product design strategies. Results show that both soft landing and exclusive secondary offerings decrease existing app users’ willingness to subscribe, but there is a positive interaction between these two strategies on subscriptions. The authors propose a theoretical framework, discuss potential mechanisms that might be at play, and conduct robustness checks to rule out several alternative explanations. A customer survey by the firm and an experiment on Prolific provide further support for the theoretical mechanism. To assess generalizability, the authors conducted a second field experiment and obtained consistent results. They also report the results from the actual implementation of the best-performing strategy by the firm. This research provides guidance on possible theoretical underpinnings of users’ responses and important managerial implications for app monetization.