NewsWatch
For a minute there I thought we were going to catch a break. Susie emailed me yesterday that she’s been contacted by NewsWatch about featuring Terrella on their show which airs on the ION Network, History Channel and FYI Channel. They claim to reach 100 million households, and, I don’t know, like a brazillian people. So this sounded like an amazing opportunity, right?
Well, then we arranged to chat with a representative who proceeded to ask us lots of questions about Quiet Spark, Terrella, our other apps, what sorts of promotion we’ve been doing, all this so he can deliver this information to a producer who will then make a determination about whether or not to feature Terrella on the show. I answered all of these questions quite well I might add. But, as we get to the end he begins explaining how all this works, telling us how many people we’ll reach, how they push the segment to their various social networks, how we’l own the video afterwards, etc. It didn’t take long to realize that I was hearing a sales pitch and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was a $3,500 shoe. Actually, after I started backing away it was explained that they work with lots of indie developers and they can knock as much as $500 off of that. Woo.
Look, as I explained to NewsWatch guy before he even got to the pitch, Quiet Spark operates on a shoestring budget. Our “budget” for promotion is extremely limited. Approaching nonexistent. We do what we can to try and generate visibility, but we rely almost exclusively on word of mouth, and the hope that those who come to know us and our apps, also know the amount of care and polish we put into them.
For a minute there I thought that maybe someone had recognized our efforts and was more than a little bummed when I realized the truth. I also learned from Twitter that I’m not the first to have been offered this opportunity, so if they contact you, and apparently they will if you make a press release, just know that this is what it’s really all about.