Kindle 2 Review Numbers don’t Measure Up
Let’s assume TechCrunch is right and 300K Kindle 2s have been sold. At Amazon there are, as of April 21st 7:35 pm PST, 2,791 Kindle 2 reviews.
This leads to some really interesting numbers -
- Less than 1 out of every 100 Kindle 2 owners is leaving a review. That’s 0.93% of owners writing reviews.
- Taking TechCrunch’s 400K estimate for Kindle 1 sales, and adding in a 20% bonus for used Kindle 1 sales, we get 500K potential Kindle 1 reviewers.
- There are 7,687 Kindle 1 reviews which translates to 1.53% of owners writing reviews.
That means there are two possibilities -
- For some magical reason, Kindle 1 owners are 1.64 times more likely to write a review; OR
- Perhaps the number of Kindle 2s sold is much less than 300K. Assuming identical ratios and 400K Kindle 1 sales (and 20% being re-sold), that’d mean 181.5K Kindle 2s sold.
My money’s on the 300K number being a bit too high.
Also, the poll we had showed that you guys feel (although the sample size is small) -
- 27% thought that less than 150K Kindle 2s have been sold.
- 23% thought that around 200K Kindle 2s had been sold.
- 46%% thought TechCrunch was right and 300K Kindle 2s had been sold.
Kindle 2 Measures Up in Owner Satisfaction
Here are some more interesting Kindle 2 review Vs Kindle 1 review numbers -
- 7,687 Kindle 1 reviews Vs 2,791 Kindle 2 reviews.
- 59.6% of Kindle 1 reviews are 5-stars. 62% of Kindle 2 reviews are 5-star reviews.
- 21.9% of Kindle 1 reviews are 4 stars. 19.6% of Kindle 2 reviews are 5-star reviews.
- Basically 81.5% of Kindle 1 owners, and 81.6% of Kindle 2 owners seem to be pretty happy. That’s an eerily similar number.
- 18.1% of Kindle 2 reviews and 18.4% of Kindle 1 reviews are 3 stars or less.
When the number of Kindle 2 reviews was 748, weeding out reviews from non-owners had indicated that the number of satisfied Kindle 2 owners (5 or 4 stars) was 86%. So it’d not be a surprise if slightly more than 81.5% of K1 and K2 owners were happy.
For all the talk of -
- Kindle 2 being only Kindle 1.5.
- Complaints and negative reviews because of the Text To Speech issue.
- Problems with screen resolution.
Exactly the same percentage of Kindle 2 owners are happy as K1 owners. This is really, really surprising to me.
If someone were crazy enough to actually filter the reviews for non-owners we might actually have the Kindle 2 come in first (because the Kindle 2 TTS being made optional resulted in a LOT of negative Kindle 2 reviews).
Filed under: reviews Tagged: | kindle analysis, Kindle Reviews
Have you considered that some folks, like myself, purchased more than one Kindle 2 (I bought 2)? Even a small percentage buying more than one can have a noticeable impact.
The ratio is 1.64:1. There’d have to be a lot of people with 2 Kindle 2s for it to account for the disparity.
And your point applies to Kindle 1s too i.e. people who owned multiple Kindle 1s.
I think that the numbers are about right because of the time lag for reviews. Many people wait a while before posting a review. Your assumption is that people post their review when they buy, but I would guess for a product like the Kindle there are a number of people that will wait for several months. Also a second impact factor is the number of people that purchased a Kindle 2 after having a Kindle 1. A portion of those will not see the K2 as needing a new and seperate review because it is not a new product category as the K1 was.
Also personally I don’t write a review after there are around 100 or so because I don’t think it is worth my time because it is unlikely to be read.
>>The ratio is 1.64:1. There’d have to be a lot of people with 2 Kindle 2s for it to account for the disparity.<>And your point applies to Kindle 1s too i.e. people who owned multiple Kindle 1s<<
No argument here, but probably not as much as K2 (again because of the out of stock situation).
On the whole without real sales numbers your ratio of reviews to sales could be way off. Interesting exercise though.
For some reason the top part of my reply was cut off. Here it is again.
I don’t expect people buying multiple Kindles to make up the difference but just to be factored in.
I think it’s very likely that 300,000 have sold. K1 was out of stock for the first few months of it’s life and then again starting about Oprahtober, so it’s numbers for that time frame (K1s only available on sites like eBay) were converted to K2.
Just so you know you’re being read with care
, point 3 in the 4 vs 5 stars section needs changing.
As for postings, I’ve often read it’s estimated that under 1% of people who visit will leave postings. This is certainly true when I look at comments vs stats of long-staying visitors at a photo site. People will enjoy things for hours and not give any feedback.
I’m definitely overly chat-prone but haven’t posted a review of either the Kindle 1 or Kindle 2.
Interesting post though!