This is just another pattern that's entirely predictable. Given a free ad-full version and a paid ad-free version, people will mostly pick the version with ads. There may be many reasons for it - through introspection of my own (old) Android purchasing habits, I can recognize at least:
- not being rich enough to spend money on things I don't have a good reason to,
- the perceived value of a piece of software being very small at the beginning, so paying up front is risky
- the belief in my ability to ignore ads on the margin, which doesn't change the fact that ads work over time, and work at scale.
Point being, this pattern is at this point perfectly predictable, so we can treat it as a law of nature - the same way gas molecules don't have to be dispersed throughout the room, they just tend to with very high probability. That's why I'm in favor of banning "free, ad-supported" as a business model, on the grounds of it being statistically harmful to the end-users and anticompetitive (if your competitor does it, you'll be forced to follow suit).
- not being rich enough to spend money on things I don't have a good reason to,
- the perceived value of a piece of software being very small at the beginning, so paying up front is risky
- the belief in my ability to ignore ads on the margin, which doesn't change the fact that ads work over time, and work at scale.
Point being, this pattern is at this point perfectly predictable, so we can treat it as a law of nature - the same way gas molecules don't have to be dispersed throughout the room, they just tend to with very high probability. That's why I'm in favor of banning "free, ad-supported" as a business model, on the grounds of it being statistically harmful to the end-users and anticompetitive (if your competitor does it, you'll be forced to follow suit).