About a year ago we started to use Google Analytics on our website. One nice thing it can do is, it gives us quite nice charts of all sorts of things. This includes a statistical evaluation of people who click links in our "expired demo versions". Latter is our term for an incomplete crack of our software.
Here's a chart of one year of traffic to our website, generated from cracks that didn't quite work out:
What does it mean?
1. ACE Day
First of all, we still have the good old 17th of each month. That's our "ACE day". On the 17th of each month ACE checks its serial number twice. If the second check fails then it displays the message "this demo has expired", with an invitation to visit our website. For 4 years now, we have record sales for ACE on the 17th and 18th of each month. I think that maybe a third of the users of ACE have first "tried" a "crack" and then felt compelled to buy. So far so good.
Those ACEs make out about 50% of the overall warez generated traffic. 40% come from Mac while 10% come from PC. That's because there's a crack on PC that works differently, it came out in December and kind of axed this method on PC, while ACE traffic on Mac continues to pour in.
Why only ACE? - Easy, because back then I thought that a simple date check would be cracked first. I put that protection in for two things: A) to test if crackers are any good and B) to have an easy way to identify the trap. Later on I switched to the different URL to identify the source/trap. Obviously, if crackers can't find a simple date check then timebombs are way to go in copy protection.
It means that ACE has a less sophisticated timebomb that happens to a lot of people, while everything else has more elaborate copy protection that targets power users.
Disclaimer: So yes, ACE day is public knowledge now. Does it matter? - Not really. The proof that crackers are easily fooled is worth more than keeping ACE day a secret. It also means that any crackers who read this will need to invest way more time and build a way more sophisticated and time consuming infrastructure to really crack things. In other words: We're contemplating to put our copy protection principles in teh public domain, not just to help others protect their software, but also to show crackers what little chance they have to succeed. I'm sure they'd cringe if they could see what we yet have up our sleeves.
2. Noise Level
The next observation that's really interesting is the extended noise floor since April. What happened there? - Quite simple, we released a new version of everything, and that's pretty much the foundation of the current cracks out there. A similar thing happened in January, but it wasn't quite as high - mostly because serial numbers were leaked, which - naturally - got blacklisted later.
Does that mean that people use more cracks after April? - No, it doesn't. It just means that previous cracks were more sucessful while current cracks have been done less thoroughly. If we wanted to deduct the whole mass of warez users, we could take ACE' other timebombs and correlate the other plug-ins with ACE day. The figure would easily exceed the total of our paying user base.
It also shows that we have a lot of headroom for timebombs. Some of them are really, really cautious. They may fire once in 3 years of production work. Maybe that's too cautious. Maybe we should lower the threshold and increase the "catch rate".
An important thing to note is, not all our timebombs display a kind invitation to visit our website. We also have the good old "melting user interface" in unlimited supply (old pic: http://www.u-he.com/img/ZMelt.png). That one doesn't pose a link, but we believe to have other evidence that it still fires quite often.
Also, I'm quite sure that a large amount of users doesn't follow our invitation. They don't click the link. Those users don't enter our statistics.
3. The Figures
If we take "ACE day" out of the picture, we can see that more than 1300 remaining people have run into our timebombs in one year and clicked the link. It would be about three times as many if the copy protection was as good last year as it is now, and the "dark figure" of people who ran into timebombs but haven't clicked may be a depressing magnifold - if only because crackers and warez forums lately recommend to cut the internet connection even though our stuff does not call home. Ever. All we do is display a link that opens in a browser. Harmless, but good for statistics.
Anyhow. 1300 people have used our stuff warezed in production. These timebombs - unlike ACE Day - don't trigger lightly. They trigger when people actually produce music and invest considerable time on their projects. These 1300 guys are power users. They are not those "wouldn't buy anyway" people.
With ACE out of the picture, we can conservatively say that we've lost 100$ on each person. That amounts to the equivalent of two full time employees that could improve our stuff, make it look nicer, work better, be better. Or, it could mean a considerable cut in price. Or both.
Nevertheless, a few of these people end up buying our stuff. That's good. We're happy to have them, but I also love to phantasize what we'd be able to do if they were more.
Just some food for thought.
