It has become a basic expectation to be able to see who’s viewing your stuff, where they’re coming from, and more. Imagine launching a startup or a small online business without Mixpanel or a Google Analytics. It would be pretty difficult. We run Gumroad based on insights that we gain from various sources. A lot of it is data. How are people really using Gumroad? What features are getting the most use? What pages are people staying on the longest, and what pages are quickly passed over and causing viewers to jump ship? How can we help viewers use Gumroad better?
But when you’re selling and sharing your work, those types of insights stop post-download. The buyer gets their book, you get a sales notification email, and that’s it. There’s zero insight after the point-of-sale. However, we think that stuff is just as important, if not more so, when you’re considering your career in the long term.
We believe that every musician, designer, writer, artist, filmmaker, and comedian deserves to know how their audiences are interacting with their content. And we’re acting on that belief with a set of features that we call Consumption Analytics.
On a product and product file level, and in real time, you’ll now be able to see how many people are reading, watching, listening, downloading, and consuming your stuff. All in your Audience Dashboard.
For books (PDFs and EPUBs), you’ll be able to dig even deeper: how many pages are read per day, how many get read on average, how many sessions it takes someone to finish your book, what retention looks like for your readers. You’ll know all this and more.
For example, if you notice a trend of reader dropoff ⅓ of the way through your novel, maybe you could do some revising. Is your tech manual being breezed through too quickly? Beef it up with some interviews and charts.
It’s an entirely new feedback loop that authors have never had access to, and we’re confident that this will quickly turn into a basic expectation.
We’ll follow this up with the same sort of insights for video and audio files as well. What part of your documentary is re-watched over and over again? At what point on your album are you losing people? Should you reorder your tracks?
So that’s what we’re shipping to your Dashboard tab. And this is possible because of the reading, listening, and viewing features built in to Gumroad, as well as the consumer-side app we launched last year. More and more people are using these “in house” ways of enjoying books, movies, comics, albums, and more every day. It’s pretty exciting.
We hope that you, and other creators, get smarter because of it and use these insights to inform future (or updates to current) projects. It’s a win-win. More successful creators with audiences who are reading/watching/hearing even better stuff!
This is just some of the value you gain from the consumer apps we’ve been investing in over the last year. There’s much more to come! Stay tuned.