Smile… :-)

Earlier this year we decided to add an option for individuals to be able to contribute to the running costs of Akismet. We believe that it’s really important that personal bloggers continue to have access to Akismet for free. But, for those that really value Akismet’s spam filtering, we wanted to provide a way to pay something.

So we added a ‘pay what you want’ option to free accounts on the signup page. While the overwhelming majority of people still choose a free account, we’ve seen a good number of people opt to pay, too.

We decided that the easiest way for users to pay something would be to use a slider. From day one this had a smiley face to the right of it. When you move the slider, the smiley changes based on how much you choose to pay. While we’ve tested a lot of things related to our pricing, we’d never tested the effect of the smiley face by itself, until now…

Of those users that chose to pay, here’s how the payments break down:

With smiley

$6 – 20%
$12 – 13%
$18 – 4%
$24 – 33%
$30 – 7%
$36 – 19%
$40 – 2%
$48 – 2%

Without smiley

$6 – 25%
$12 – 33%
$18 – 10%
$30 – 5%
$36 – 27%

Can you spot the huge difference between the two?

It turns out, the $24 mark is the last smiling face position before switching to a slight frown ($18).

Looks like a simple frowning face can get people to double their payment from $12 to $24. We found this data super interesting, what do you think?