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Get a free office suite from SoftMaker AND they donate money for each download

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CoolCat26:
Untill December 24 SoftMaker runs a charity campaign:

They give away a complete office suite including word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation-graphics program at no charge.

Good enough. But even better: for each free download they donate 10 Euro cents to charity projects.

Everyone can monitor how much downloads created how much money and where it flows,

check it out and share this information, I think it's a great thing:

www.loadandhelp.com

tomos:
They've donated €2,000 so far.
There's been over 30,000 downloads so far (since December 12th I think) so they'll be having to donate a lot more by Christmas eve.

Edvard:
Downloaded. Thanks for the heads up!  :Thmbsup:

Tinman57:
  So how is the company making profit from this, is it ad based?

TaoPhoenix:
 So how is the company making profit from this, is it ad based?
-Tinman57 (December 18, 2012, 08:41 PM)
--- End quote ---

If I were a Business guy, it's like viral advertising. Companies developing software should have a couple of bucks in the bank, not trying to monetize every last click from Day 3. This is gonna sound harsh but "donating 3,500 pounds" is peanuts for a company, it's like 6 weeks of fast food job pay. What they gain instead is a "use case" for 10 cents a piece where ordinary ad campaigns might run them thousands of dollars for a particular ad campaign in the old style.

Edit:
In the download process they ask for Name (of course I am "User"), Country, and an email address where they can "From time to time, we will send you our newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on what's happening at SoftMaker. This newsletter is free of charge, and you may unsubscribe at any time.". So it's that age old "Free As In Beer" by trading a newsletter recipient for a one time 10 penny donation. Standard business tradeoff.

Edit2: Now when you run it, it wants a name, email address, and serial number. On a second screen it tries to ask for your address and phone number and more. You can bypass that. Then for every startup it seems to show an ugly "sidebar" that I can't figure out how to permanently turn off. It's basically an ad for itself. Summary - more typical tricks behind the "yay free" hype that starts threads. I'm going back to LibreOffice.

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