Recently a consumer software publisher said they were approached by a big German PC magazine requesting to feature the software product on the PC magazine’s covermount CD. The magazine asked to bundle a fully functional version of the software product. No compensation was offered. What should the software company do?

It certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask for money upfront. Some magazines will pay, and sometimes they’ll pay well since they’re asking for a free copy of something others are paying significant money for. We’ve done a couple of deals where the software vendor was paid a one time upfront fee of $5-$8K, though that tends to be the exception more than the norm certainly.

The next best thing is to give them an older version which prompts users to upgrade to the new version, or to give them a Lite version which doesn’t have all features enabled, and when users click a non-Lite feature they are asked to upgrade from Lite to a higher version.

It would be great if they accepted a trial version but they generally don’t since it doesn’t have perceived value to their readers. Another option is to ask them for a free advertisement in their publication or a story included in that issue about your product if they haven’t already offered that. Either option gets at least some traffic to your site where hopefully you can offer their readers additional products or editions of your product.

Some software vendors just want the free exposure (think word-of-mouth) more than anything and are OK without having a way to monetize it at all, and that’s fine too if you’re comfortable with that. Especially since the magazine is based in Germany and most likely most of those magazine subscribers wouldn’t have found your particular product on their own anyway, so it’s not likely cannibalizing your business to any great extent by giving it away for free, unless your primary market happens to be Germany, though even so there are still advantages along with disadvantages.

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