DMs Guild Pay What You Want on the DMs Guild - An Analysis and Explanation

My one PWYW (and only current product) is sitting at about 6% paid from total sales. Total gross of $3.01, but it is very new. I'm intrigued by the idea of putting it behind a small paywall and making a vastly trimmed down version as a PWYW "trial" version. I've only seen one poster mention doing that. Anyone else give that a try?

oreofox said:

I am sorta "doing this for exposure", but that seems like a difficult uphill battle, especially with how often new items get added to the DMsGuild. I noticed that the DriveThruRPG portion of the OBS sites isn't very active (the one where you can put OGL 5e products that aren't FR and now Ravenloft items), which makes me reluctant about making any non-DMsG items for 5e. It's the sole reason I put these elemental products on the dm guild instead.

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I put an adventure on DriveThruRPG 2 weeks ago (pay what you want) and I got similar sales numbers than what you have. The only active marketing effort I did to promote it was a press release on ENWorld/Facebook and put the URL of my website in my signature. I don't think the website has anything to do with how many people downloaded your product.

The "problem" is that the RPG market is bloated and without an extra marketing effort (like paying for advertising), nobody will notice your product. Putting a freebee to get famous isn't an efficient marketing strategy. Free products only work to snatch someone's email.