Version 1.0 of my Rebrand Add-on is finally available.
The Rebrand add-on allows you to change the names and images that are used by Firefox and Thunderbird. You can change it to whatever you want. Here’s my browser:
Disclaimer: This extension is for entertainment purposes only. Do not try to ship your renamed browser. Also this add-on doesn’t fully rebrand on the Mac – the menubar name can’t be changed with an extension.
Enjoy!
Recently there was a post on on the Mozilla Add-ons Blog about Contributions. While that information was interesting, what I’d much rather see is individual developers talking about their experiences with Contributions. Hopefully my post will start a trend. (For those who don’t know, Contributions is a way for people to donate to the developers of Firefox Add-ons.)
When Contributions was first made available, the mechanism was flawed. You were asking a user to contribute when first downloading an add-on (which is unlikely since they haven’t actually tried the add-on), or somehow expecting the user to make it back to the add-on page to do the contribution (which is again unlikely since most users never go back to the add-on page since updates are handled through Firefox.). The AMO team tried to remedy this problem by creating a first run page, but this has the same problem – a user isn’t likely to contribute money at first run because they haven’t actually tried the add-on yet. But the existence of this page allows us to take advantage of displaying a request at a much better point than download or first run – upgrade.
Presenting a contribution page after an upgrade is a much more logical scenario, since your users have probably had your add-on installed for a while. I chose to use this method with the Operator add-on.
We need some numbers to put this post in context. As of today, Operator has about 160,000 downloads with around 14 to 15 thousand active daily users. (I’ve made my dashboard public so people can see these numbers.) That means I’ve had about a 10% download to user conversion rate.
As a side note, this 10% number seems to be pretty common. If you look on the AMO page today, you’ll see 1,624,545,716 downloads, 170,724,304 users. This works out to about 10%. I’ve actually seen this number with other companies and add-ons as well. It would be interesting to see if other people see this trend as well.
I released an update to my add-on on October 12, 2009. This update contained a first run page that would be seen by all users including upgrades. This page is hosted on my website so I can easily track page views. From October 12, 2009 to October 19 ,2009 (1 week), that page has received 11,469 hits from which we can reasonably conclude that there were at least 11,000 upgrades, which is a considerable amount of my users.
I set my contribution amount at 5 dollars before I released the update. During that week I received 8 contributions of 5 dollars.
So to summarize, 1 week, 11,000 upgrades and views of the contributions page, 8 contributions. That works out to about a 0.07% conversion rate. I don’t know much about advertising or these types of things in general, but my understanding is that ad conversion rates typically run anywhere from 1% to 4%, so this is extremely low.
I certainly don’t have any complaints about this scenario – I’m not trying to earn a living from Operator, and any funds I receive are just extra. But I was surprised at how low it was. I pictured Operator as kind of a “”niche” add-on so I thought more people would be interested in supporting it.
Some other random observations:
Any other add-on authors interested in sharing their experience?
I’m finally making Operator 0.9.5 available. You can download it from AMO. (It might not be there yet).
This version has a very significant change – I’ve removed the ability to have Operator present itself based on actions versus the data. I don’t believe this will affect most people – data has been the default for a long time, and I would bet that is what most people use. If there is significant pushback, I’ll reconsider. The reason I made this change is because I now allow you to turn individual actions on and off and I thought it would be very confusing to have the ability to specify actions on a toolbar, as well as turn off individual actions.
You also might find that some of your user scripts are not working anymore (particularly ones that install new microformats). I’ll be working on solving this problem over the next few weeks. Basically the problem was that I had told people to explicitly import the Microformats API but if you do that, you don’t get the new Microformats API included with Operator. I haven’t found a good way to completely solve this problem so for now I had to disable anything that tries to include Microformats.js. I’m working on a way to sandbox my API from the Firefox API.
So to summarize the changes:
