Humble eBook Bundle Passes $600k, Adds Five Awesome Webcomic Books

from the under-promise-and-over-deliver dept

One of the general rules for successful marketing is to under promise and over deliver, and the guys at Humble Bundle seem to keep doing that. While they’ve become famous for showing how cool bundles of digital products on a limited-time “pay what you want” basis can be a massive success, they keep doing really interesting things to tweak those experiments to show how you can “under promise and over deliver” in a way that encourages people to (happily) pay more and get more than they expect. From the beginning, they’ve used the charitable component (you can designate whatever portion of what you pay to go to charity) to get people to pay more — something studies have shown works well to get people to pay higher amounts. They’ve also offered special products if you pay above the average price, which encourages people to both buy earlier, when the price may be lower, and to pay more, to get over the average to get the “special” extras. Finally, they consistently add awesome new products later on, while the Bundle is still going — adding those extras automatically to everyone who already bought (encouraging people to buy early) or making them available to new buyers who pay above the average (again, pushing the amount people want to pay higher).

This round is no exception. After raising over $500,000 for the first round of (great) books, mostly from sci-fi authors, they’ve now added a pretty awesome “webcomic bundle” to the batch:

For everyone who’s already ordered, or anyone new who pays over the existing average price, they now also get:

  • xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe
  • Penny Arcade Volume 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
  • Penny Arcade Volume 2: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
  • Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weiner
  • The Most Dangerous Game: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weiner

Of course, these are basically the three biggest names in webcomics, especially among the geekset who is probably already quite into Humble Bundle. It’s yet another case of over delivering in a fun and exciting way.

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Companies: humble bundle

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Comments on “Humble eBook Bundle Passes $600k, Adds Five Awesome Webcomic Books”

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19 Comments
ClarkeyBalboa (profile) says:

Humble Bundle got my attention with this one. Might buy two copies so my brother can read some PA while overseas on mission. Amazing how they have taken products that are essentially given away for free over the internet by the creators, and found another way to somehow make money off it. Humble Bundle must be using witchcraft.

Anonymous Coward says:

Finally, they consistently add awesome new products later on, while the Bundle is still going — adding those extras automatically to everyone who already bought (encouraging people to buy early) or making them available to new buyers who pay above the average (again, pushing the amount people want to pay higher).

Dang, I’m glad you mentioned this! I had no idea they liked to add stuff afterward.
Just redeemed my Steam code for the four extra games they added to Bundle #6 while I wasn’t looking. Thanks!

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