I have found certain shareware software products have large number of downloads. My question is if there are some 20,000 free downloads, how many of the downloaders would have actually bought and paid for this software?For Conversion sake consider a small Image Editing Tool with some 40$ price tag
Software Website Market Online Conversion
Your question will never have a concrete answer due to the fact that there is too many factors. to list a few:
Quite hard to answer your questions as it does not looks like a real question.
Q: ..."A shop sell 100 apples a day, how many apples where hand collected and how many fall from the tree..." A: Ask to the farmer :)
It depends a lot on the software, but generally 5% is very good conversion for most shareware apps. 1% is more typical.
Does 20,000 free downloads mean at least 10,000 paid sales?You must be joking - no, it does not. That woudl be a 50% conversion rate - you do not get that ever.
how many of the downloaders would have actually bought and paid for this software?ForNO IDEA. That depends on many factors, among others the TYPE of software, the features without paying etc.
Whatever it is, it will NOT be 50%. That would be totally awesome for a lot of companies but it is totally unrealistic - the real number is between 0 and some LOW percentage number.
LOL, a 50% download conversion rates means they must be downloading the digital version of crack cocaine for it to be that additive they're then paying!