What your data suggests is that the Contribution program performs about as well as an ad campaign. At $40 for 11,000 impressions means you could have sold an ad on the page for $3.63 and netted the same amount. Given your audience, you could probably command this “premium” price and you definitely outperformed the $0.25 CPM ad networks pay.

From an ad performance standpoint, click-through rates (CTR) continue to drop. A CTR of 0.5% is decent which means 55 people would click through and you converted 15%. Not bad if you’re looking at it from an advertising perspective. Not good if you’re looking to get more than a gracious thank you from those 8 people.

For developers looking to leverage the Firefox ecosystem to build a business, Contributions doesn’t appear to make a material difference for those opportunities.

Interesting post. I remember when contributions first came out thinking exactly this, that donate up front or straight after installation is not going to work too well.

In terms of figures for my addon, I have 2,747,469 downloads, with 290,286 active daily users, so yes 10% seems to be the norm. At the start I was getting a few donations (I set the price low at $0.99, like the app store difficult to know what is an appropriate figure), but has dried up now. AMO cycle their recommended addons, and I do not think it coincidence that donations stopped after my addon was taken off this last last month – goes to show how powerful this recommended list can be not just in exposure, but contributions as well it would seem.

One area I do think would benefit from a contribute button is in the addons dialog within firefox – I quite often go in there to clean it out/remind what addons I have, and of course it shows when updates are available, so by having a contribution button in there users might be more inclined to donate to their most used/useful addons.

Another suggestion I have seen elsewhere is a premium AMO where users pay for addons up front, but this does not appeal to me as a ‘part time’ developer as users paying for an addon are not unreasonably going to expect better support/maintenance/updates etc with pay for addons, something I cannot garuantee.

There are clearly users out there that are willing and kind enough to contribute, we just need a bit more imagintive thought from Mozilla on how they can hook us up with them – a vibrant and sustainable AMO ecosystem benefits us all.

However having said all of the above, contributions are not what motivates me to develop for firefox, it is just nice to have users thank you for your efforts in this way.

Cheers, tones