A little over a year ago, I posted that I was taking a hiatus from MDM Deals to think about its future, chiefly what happens to a site dedicated to great deals on fantastic apps…when most of the fantastic apps have switched over to subscription models and no longer have great deals.
Initially I thought the answer could be a membership program in which I find deals for you, negotiate deals with developers, and recommend apps. Then immense technical challenges came, I changed my job, another baby came along, and I realized that I couldn’t give it the time that a membership program needed.
Thus, this post is to announce what most of you already know and have guessed: the end of MDM Deals. For another year or so, the website and content will stick around (so long as technical programs don’t crop up!) and you can still reach me at deals @ mdmdeals.com.
It’s been a great run! Over the 6 years of MDM Deals I curated over 80,000 deals which were viewed over 484,000 times (on this site alone–that doesn’t track visits at all the other channels).
I’ll still be on the internet, of course! You can reach me on Twitter @MarkDMill — and I started a new blog for some new writing that you can check out, The Prepared Expat.
I’m excited to announce MDM Deals 2.8 “Yikes, that’s better” with a bunch of changes and improvements to make discovering great deals even better. Read about how to Shut Mark up, ads that don’t stink and how to block them, the end of spam, why to trust me, and more
Ads that don’t stink
Ok, let’s face it, the ads that were on the site before were terrible. Spammy and clickbaity with “You’ll never guess what she said to her husband” nonsense that was totally irrelevant to 99.99% of you (there’s always that one person…). The ads stunk, the monetization stunk, and the experience stunk.
I am super excited to let you know that I’ll be using Google Ads on the site now, which allows me more granular control over which ads appear so that they’ll actually be relevant and not clickbait. In my tests, I’ve been really pleased to see ads appear for Parallels 16, Wikibuy, Casetify, and even specific apps on the App Store–rather than distracting from the site, they showed other ways to save money or related apps that might interest you. Yikes, that’s better.
Block ads with impunity
Now, I know a lot of you hate ads and trackers. I do too. But without Apple’s App Store affiliate program–ended over a year ago now–the ads enable me to keep this site free for everyone rather than having it for members only. And when sponsors come to the site, ads will go away–you can thank the sponsors by checking out their product
But I get the adblock thing. So here’s my deal for you: join my Patreon for any amount–even $1/month–and I’ll give you “Adblock Amnesty” so you can block ads without a guilty conscience that you’re preventing me from getting paid for my hard work. I curate around 250 deals a month, so that’s just half a penny a post.
Support via ads or Patreon and we’ll be great! Break the deal and…well, a thousand angry internet goats will haunt your dreams forever as you lose internet karma for denying me hard-earned ad revenue…
So support the site (via ads or Patreon) and have good karma and no goats. See? Way better.
Join the Shut Mark Up campaign
I’m excited to announce a completely revamped Patreon page with more perks for you–and benefits for all MDM Deals fans when we hit certain numbers!
First, EVERY patron now gets access to custom filtered emails, in addition to supporting this site with Adblock Amnesty. As a Patron at any level, you can get one ad-free email each day with just the deals you want. Don’t care about books? Filter those out. Don’t have a Mac? Say goodbye to those. Get rid of everything you don’t want. It’s the best way to get MDM Deals each day–and now its available for Every.Single.Patron.
Second, I’ve fine-tuned the tiers to bring you better perks at lower prices, including an all-new Deal Alerts perk. Maybe you know exactly what app, book, or piece of tech you want to buy and you don’t want to look through the deals every day to see if it went on sale. Now with Deal Alerts, just let me know what you want to buy and I’ll tell you when it goes on sale! This is an exclusive perk for Patrons who pledge as Fan+ or Fan Pro levels! I’m super excited about being able to serve you this extra way!
Third, shut me up about supporting this site! Each day I remind you of what I did to serve you that day, but you can shut me up–and remove ads! When we get 50 patrons I’ll stop those daily reminders and when we get 75 patrons I’ll remove ads site-wide! Your patronage can benefit those who are in a harder spot than you and shut me up all at the same time. Nice.
Fourth, for a limited time only, you can get a special gift from me for your patronage! All patrons on November 5th, 2020 will receive a special MDM Deals sticker. They’re super cool and I can’t wait to get one to you!
The new Patreon. Yikes, that’s way better.
Trust me…no, I mean, really
I can’t tell you how many sites recommend that I trick you into clicking an affiliate link so that when you buy cat food tomorrow, I get affiliate revenue from you.
That’s ridiculous and a complete violation of the principles that guides MDM Deals: it’s not treating you how I want to be treated, it adds friction to your life rather than taking it away, and it violates your trust of me because you don’t know if my curation is for my benefit or for yours.
Today there are two changes I’m announcing to increase your trust and prevent you from clicking on affiliate links so you save time. You come first, not me:
First, all apps will list star ratings if they have them. Previously, if an app only had a few ratings, they wouldn’t appear as I didn’t want to distract you–but I realized that was violating trust. So now, app star ratings will appear no matter what they are. (Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t allow me to show their ratings and Apple Book ratings are available to me, or else I would include those).
Second, when I use an affiliate link, I will explicitly mention it on each post before the link appears. If there’s no mention of an affiliate link, there is none and I get absolutely nothing from your purchase (become a Patron!) Initially I just had this disclosure on my legal page so I wouldn’t distract you, but I decided that listing it every single time will help you trust me and my curation. Who knows? Maybe someday I can remove affiliate links entirely because there are so many Patrons.
Building trust with you all, even if it hurts my revenue. Yikes, that’s better.
The end of hashtag & flair spam
For a while, MDM Deals on Twitter and the alternate Reddit sub had a spam problem. Some deals, announcements, summary, and sponsors would post not just once–which would be what you’d expect!–but half a dozen times. It was an unfortunate result of my system (I’ll spare the details), but those days are over.
I actually paid someone to develop some code and I’ll spare the details, but it works beautifully. Now, every post will appear just once and all items have hashtags or flair, making for a way way better experience without hashtag and flair spam.
If you’ve left MDM Deals’ Twitter or Reddit because of the spam, try it again. It’s WAY better.
Misc stuff
Some other smaller changes I’ve made–it’s been a busy season!–but aren’t too big:
Apps from the App Store and StackSocial now use the official app descriptions rather than rewriting my own. I’ll still add my own comments, but no need to reduplicate that work!
I now support deals for iOS & Mac cross-platform apps where you can pay for it outside the App Stores. This was pretty fun to develop and will enable me to better serve you, as there are some great apps and services that do billing outside the App Store. Yay!
I now support Amazon product groups instead of singular items. Previously, if Anker had a sale, I had to list every single item which took up a lot of space. Now I can post a link to all their products and give you an overview of them. Should be way better!
Yikes! That’s way better
So that’s a ton of changes and, believe me, a TON of work behind the scenes to make this all possible. Every day I spend tons of time improving MDM Deals, finding deals, and curating just the best for you. If you have ever saved money or discovered something, please support my work on Patreon. It’s better than ever.
Hey all! As you may recall, I launched Tech Deals as part of MDM Deals 2.6 and then quickly suspended Amazon tech deals because I didn’t have a method to post them which met my standards for integrity. I am excited to say that after much research and trial, I believe I’ve come up with a good solution–and so the deals are back!
Tech Deals: What to Expect
Every day, I will post ONE post on mdmdeals.com that contains all Amazon Tech Deals for the day; that post will include pictures, prices, a description, whether or not I recommend it, and an affiliate link to download the item from Amazon.
To comply with Amazon’s rules, I can’t publish that post with prices and direct links to all my channels; instead, what you’ll see if a list of the items on sale with a link back to my website so you can get current prices and see more details.
Updates to Book Deals & Whaller
As much as I loved curating Book Deals & Audiobook Deals, these took a disproportionate amount of time to curate (up to an hour a day) and just weren’t worth my time for how infrequently you were interested in them. To put numbers on it, I made an average of $0.36/hour, so…yeah…not so good. However, when a book I love goes on sale, I’ll still publish that through because there’s still some great stuff
One other minor thing–I will no longer be supporting Whaller as a publication channel. Only one of you followed there and I started to get some errors on the channel, so it is being discontinued as of today.
I have some other great stuff in the pipeline, so stay tuned!
And as a quick reminder–if you have saved money or discovered something through MDM Deals, would you give back a portion of that to help me keep the site up and running? I’d love your support, whether ongoing via Patreon or a one-time coffee via Buy Me a Coffee. Thanks!
This post may contain affiliate links which support this site with a small commission at no cost to you. More.
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This post may contain affiliate links which support this site with a small commission at no cost to you. More.
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[amalinkspro type=”showcase” asin=”B081FWLDZ2″ apilink=”https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081FWLDZ2?tag=mar01a-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1″ associate-id=”” new-window=”1″ addtocart=”0″ nofollow=”1″ sc-id=”4″ imgs=”LargeImage” link-imgs=”false” stack-imgs=”false” specs=”New Apple MacBook Pro, 16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage, 2.6GHz Intel Core i7~~~Stunning 16-inch Retina Display with True Tone technology~~~Touch Bar and Touch ID~~~Six-speaker system with force-cancelling woofers~~~MDM Deals highly recommends~~~Typical price: $2399; see current price below~~~” btn-color=”#ff9900″ btn-text=”View on Amazon” alignment=”alignnone” hide-prime=”0″ hide-image=”0″ hide-reviews=”0″ hide-price=”0″]New Apple MacBook Pro (16-Inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage, 2.6GHz Intel Core i7) – Silver[/amalinkspro]
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A bunch of family & friends asked me how we lived through 6 months of enforced home quarantine — I wrote up my top 10 tips. Has nothing to do with deals, but I thought it valuable to share with you to help you out during this time.
Quick update: I am temporarily pausing most of Tech Deals as part of MDM Deals–not because of COVID-19 but because I need some time to figure out how to balance complying with Amazon’s rules while maintaining my values of integrity. Read on to get the full scoop.
You’ll notice that deals today don’t include prices. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that Amazon doesn’t allow prices that could become out of date. I’m looking into solutions, but for now you’ll have to go to the Amazon page to see the price and discount—just trust me that they are big enough discounts to be “fantastic” 🙂..
Thanks to the coronavirus that has hit my city in Asia, my family has been in lockdown for the past few weeks–don’t worry, we’re safe (so far!)–but I’ve taken the extra time to update MDM Deals. Today I’m rolling out brand-new Tech Deals, support for Audiobook Deals, and updates to Book deals! Read on to learn more!
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Brand new! Tech Deals!
On last month’s survey, a vast majority of you said that you’d be interested on seeing deals for tech hardware & accessories, and I am excited to let you know that they are now here! These deals will start slowly as I build out my system, and I’m still rolling this out to all channels, but in the next week you should see tech deals slowly showing up in your feeds.
Guiding principles: There are millions of tech products and accessories and dozens of stores that sell them, so Tech Deals won’t even attempt to be as exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage as App Deals, but there are still gems I run across each day that I’ll curate for you. Tech Deals will include discounts on things like Apple hardware, cases, cables, speakers, routers, chargers, etc.–basically things that someone in the Apple ecosystem would love and use (so not Samsung computers, Google Home devices, or Amazon Echo speakers).
For those of you who said you’d buy me a coffee for adding in tech deals, well, here ya go！
New: Audiobook Deals
I’m excited to say that I will now be curating audiobook deals on the Apple Bookstore! This will automatically start showing up in your feeds this week. There aren’t nearly as many deals on audiobooks as books, so these will be more rare. For ways to see the deals, see below.
As always, my goal is to serve you, helping you discover awesome apps, books, and gear and save money in the process. If I have served you, I’d love your support to keep this site up and running. You can do that one-time through Buy Me a Coffee or on an ongoing basis through Patreon. Both are awesome.
The survey results are and I’ve been hard at work changing things in light of the results. Today I’m excited to announce the most significant change to MDM Deals to date–a change so big, in fact, that even the tagline of the website has changed. Ready? Drumroll please…
MDM Deals: Discover great deals on fantastic apps and books
Yup, that’s right: movies are gone and books are here. Read on to learn about 3 big changes to MDM Deals:
Bye bye movies
The survey results made abundantly clear that you weren’t so interested in movies. In fact, 80% of you said that you’d be happier without movies, so they’re gone. For the 5% of you who said you’d buy me a coffee for removing books, well…here ya go:
Hello, books
A significant majority of you said that you’d be interested in deals on ebooks–and so I’m excited to start curating ebooks this week! Ebooks will appear tonight on MDMDeals.com and I’ll be rolling them out to all 20+ channels over the course of the week. As always, I’ll do my best as I do to provide filtering options so you can ignore ebook deals if you like. Four other things to note as we get going:
I picked the arbitrary price point of $7.99 to begin curation. There may be occasions where I list books on sale for more than $7.99, but most will be $7.99 or less. I’d love your feedback on if that’s the right price point.
Curation
While there’s only a few million apps on the App Store, there are hundreds of millions of books. That makes deal curation all the more important, it also means my ebook curation will reflect my interests more than my app curation does. For example:
I have no interest or expertise in Romance novels, so you’ll never see those
I love history and biographies, and because my history interests are more about US and China, you’ll see more of that
I’ll do my absolute best to curate to a general audience, so your feedback is super helpful, but you’ll definitely see my interests and personality reflected in ebook curation–for good and bad :-).
Book genres
My present plan is to curate ebooks in the following genres. In alphabetical order:
Biography & memoir
Business & personal finance
Fiction (more rare, mostly best sellers & classics)
History
Lifestyle & home (more rare, but Marie Kondo deserves to be curated)
Mystery & thrillers (more rare, but Tom Clancy deserves appearances)
Non-fiction
Parenting (more rare)
Professional & technical (more rare)
Reference
Religion & spirituality (more rare)
Sci-Fi & fantasy
Science & nature
At present, I intend to NOT curate the following genres:
Cookbooks
Fiction (apart from best-selling or classic works)
Graphic novels
Health, body, & mind
Politics*
Romance
Sports & recreation
Travel & adventure
Wine & food
*I’m interested in politics, but I don’t want to politicize MDM Deals by curating to my interests, nor will I attempt to keep choices “well-balanced,” so I’ll just ignore the category. I will, however, curate biographies of political leaders across the spectrum because we can all learn from the lives of people like Reagan, Clinton, Bush, & Obama.
I really appreciate your feedback on the survey; it has been most helpful identifying ways that MDM Deals can do better going forward. As I have time to grow MDM Deals, here’s my initial priorities for 2020:
Develop ebooks into a full-fledged part of MDM Deals
The launch of something I’m calling Dealworthies, which I can’t wait to tell you about.
Adding paid custom price drop alerts so you can choose to be alerted when a specific item goes on sale
As always, your support of the site is very much appreciated! I run this all in my spare time and give up significant time each day to find and publish the deals for you. If you appreciate what I do, would you buy me a coffee or join my Patreon?
Just a couple days left to win some of the $60 I’m giving away
He’ll me out by taking this 9-question survey on how to improve MDM Deals—it takes an average of 4 minutes and you could win some of the $60 in gift certificates & promo codes I am giving away
There’s some big possible changes to MDM Deals coming up and I’d love your feedback on them! As a thank you, I’m giving away $60 worth of App Store gift cards & promo codes!
I really want to thank the New Year Powerpack for their support of MDM Deals this week. It’s sponsors like them that enable me to get deals to you—Sonix you haven’t checked out their bundle yet, you really out to. Unclutter at 50% individually is a steal—so is Tumult Hype, Taskpaper, Default Folder X, and Sip—and the entire bundle is worth it just for 2 or 3 of those, but you get 11 total handpicked apps
You may have noticed that the Xmas & New Year’s PowerPack was a recommended item on the monster list of Christmas & New Year’s deals — well, after publishing that list, the developer reached out to sponsor MDM Deals and I’m so glad he did, because there’s some really great items in this bundle that you don’t want to miss:
Aeon Timeline – The timeline tool for creative writing, project and case management. Normally $50, now 50% off
Tumult Hype 4 – Create. Animate. HTML5. Standard Edition. Normally $50, now 50% off
Unclutter – Files, Notes & Clipboard Manager for Mac. Normally $20, now 50% off
TaskPaper 3 – Plain text to-do lists for Mac. Normally $25, now 50% off
Better Zip 4 – The Next Generation of Archiving. Normally $25, now 50% off
Sip – Color Picker & Organizer for Mac. Normally $10, now 50% off
Permute 3 – The easiest to use media converter. Normally $15, now 50% off
Path Finder 9 – File Manager for macOS. Normally $36, now 50% off
Mosaic Pro – Effortlessly resize and re-position windows on your Mac. Normally $30, now 50% off
Default Folder X – Enhanced Open and Save dialogs for macOS. Normally $35, now 50% off
HyperFocus – The Distraction Blocker for macOS. Normally $15, now 50% off
Not only is each individual app in the bundle 50% off–already a great deal–but if you buy the entire bundle, you get $311 worth of apps for just $64–that’s a whopping 79% off.
Supercharge your productivity in 2020 with the Xmas & New Year PowerPack. My thanks to the developers of this collection for sponsoring MDM Deals this week!
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