Headup

As I mentioned in my last post the top four “most downloaded” Firefox addons published are responsible for over 15% of all addon downloads and were written by only three men. Mr Giorgio Maone wrote two of the top four and is single handedly responsible for a staggering 112 million addon downloads to date. I’m hard pressed to think of another example of how the work of just one man has benefitted so many people in such a short time.

Wishful thinking (photo by striatic)

The Top Four

1. FlashGot – by  Mr. Giorgio Maone – 64 million downloads.
2. Adblock Plus – by Mr. Wladimir Palant – 49 million downloads
3. NoScript – also by  Mr. Giorgio Maone – 48.5 million downloads
4. Video DownloadHelper by Mr. Michel Gutierrez – 38 million downloads.

8 addon marketing tips from the masters

These gentlemen were good enough to share some of their insights in the discussion that served as the basis for this post. What follows is a summary of the points they raised:

1. Build a unique plugin that people need.
2. “If you build it they will come” – great addons are passed on from user to user.
3. Develop extensions that provide services you can explain in a single sentence, for example “Headup is the Firefox extension that connects you to your interests and friends”.
4. Develop extensions that are easy to use. A great addon can be used by anyone, doesn’t require reading a manual and doesn’t need configuration. If necessary experienced users can be offered advanced options.
   
5. Ensure your extension’s name indicates its purpose clearly.
6. Be responsive. Follow up on user commentary on the AMO and elsewhere. If you have a website for your addon, a feedback service like GetSatisfaction can be a great free way to communicate with your users and gradually build a valuable support resource. Twitter is another great tool for communicating with your users. It’s fast and is still populated mostly by technophiles. Check out our @headup account to get an impression of how I’ve been using it to interact with our user community.
7. Educate enterprises about the advantages they stand to gain from your addon and let them do your marketing for you. This is especially true if your addon helps the enterprise accomplish its goals or saves it development time.
8. Reach out to advocacy groups, consultants and bloggers specializing in your addon’s field and get them to try out and review your product.

This is also good advice (photo by gary j wood)

To view and participate in the original discussion from which I summarized these pointers go to: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.extensions/browse_thread/thread/b3d5edc8d9ae4521

Acknowledgments and Thanks:

I would hate to misrepresent myself and therefore I wish to make it clear that the tips offered above are not my own, rather they are based on the collective wisdom of  a truly incredible trio: Giorgio Maone, Wladimir Palant & Michel Gutierrez, furthermore without the good advice of Rey Bango and Eric Jung the materials used of this post could not have been collected.

THANK YOU ALL!

When all is said and done

In my original request for help in locating materials about marketing Firefox addons I expressed my surprise at the evident scarcity of such resources. To this Mr. Eric Jung replied that:

“Given the grass-roots nature of most addons, I’m not surprised by this (lack of resources). You might find yourself trail blazing.”

I’m usually a pretty lazy guy and trail-blazing isn’t really for me.
Frankly I’d have much preferred to find a bunch of juicy resources to work with instead of bothering with all this research, but if what I’ve collected here is deemed useful by you dear reader,
it was all worth it!

Mike
“I tweet @headup”
: )

As the “marketing guy” for a company that has a Firefox addon as its first public product, naturally I’m interested in the promotion and marketing of browser extensions. Surprisingly, despite the steady increase in addon development over the years, I was pretty hard pressed to find materials about the effective methods for promoting them.
After doing some research and reaching out to members of the Mozilla community I was finally pointed by Mr. Rey Bango, add-ons community lead for Mozilla, to the Google group for Mozilla extension developers where I again posted my request for help. The next day I got a response from community member Eric Jung who suggested that I contact the developers of successful addons and ask them what their secret was.

A little Chutzpah goes a long way

As audacious as it might sound I actually followed Eric’s advice. I used the AMO site’s search features to discover which Firefox addons had been downloaded the most times over the years, and then sent invitations to their developers asking them to share their marketing hints, tips and insights on the group’s message board.

"We are the champions my friend..." (photo by www.ericcastro.biz)

Despite the fact that I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy I was expecting this venture to be a complete failure. I was sure none of the people and companies I’d approached would bother answering my call so you can imagine how amazed I was when within a week of my initial invitation ALL the non-enterprise developers I’d invited to the discussion answered and shared their hard gained insights…

In my next post I’ll list the tips shared by these developers and disclose their identities, but before I do I’d like to take a minute to discuss just how popular Firefox addons really are and what commonalities are displayed between the most successful ones out there:

How popular are Firefox addons?

At Mozilla’s last “all-hands” Mr. Nick Nguyen gave the following presentation regarding the future of addons.mozilla.org (AMO) which tells us some pretty interesting things about the addon phenomenon.
According to Nguyen:

1. The AMO site is home to over 3.5 thousand public addons.
2. The AMO has served over 1.3 billion downloads.
3. Currently there are over 160 million addons installed.
4. The top 5% of all addons account for 80% of all downloads.
5. 50% of the traffic to the AMO site is from the US and 40% comes from Europe.
6. 53% of AMO visitors are English speakers. 10% are German speakers.

What do successful Firefox add-ons have in common?

Far from me to claim that coincidence is causality. I’m also a big fan of the quote:

“There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics.“

…attributed to Benjamin D’israeli, Alfred Marshall, Mark Twain and other famous dead people.
That said I’d like to list a few commonalities I’ve observed while researching this topic:

Being featured helps

One of the most fascinating statistics Nguyen’s slides present is that 99% of the top 5% addons have been on the AMO “featured” list. Addon developers would do well to familiarize themselves with the AMO’s guidelines regarding the selection of addons for this list.

2006 was a good year

Looking at the top of the chart it’s hard to ignore that a disproportionate number of the top addons were first published in 2006. I realize that unless time travel becomes a widely available soon this isn’t really helpful. It’s worth noting that second best year for popular addons is 2007. Together these two statistics suggest that good addons are a little like wine – they require patience and they age well. If immediate gratification is your thing the addon game might not be for you…

Addons are a one man show

Most of the top addons on the AMO were developed by a single developer. In fact the top four addons, together accounting for a staggering 200 Million downloads which are nearly 15% of all addon downloads, were written by three developers who’s insights you’ll find in my next post…

Although opinions about scope and scheduling tend to vary most experts agree that the transformation of “The Web” in to “The Semantic Web” is only a matter of time.
Based on the experience from the last major upheaval – the transition to “Web 2.0”, it’s safe to assume that regardless of the details, the transition will be a gradual one. This will be a process of Evolution rather than Revolution.

Change is coming (image by Maria Reyes-McDavis)

When will it begin?

One need only observe the steady increase over the past two years in the amount of enterprises and services focused on the Semantic Web space to realize that the process is already well under way.

Advances in web technology instigate social change

One of the lessons to be learned from the last transition the Web went through is that advances in web technology are powerful instigators for social adaptations and cultural evolution:

• Blogging
• Online social networking
• Crowd sourcing

These are just a few examples of some of the social adaptations that can be attributed to the transition to Web 2.0. It should be obvious that the transition to Semantic Web will have, indeed is having already, a similar impact. This post is an attempt to predict what impact the transition will have on our habits as consumers.

Buying online today

Our experiences as customers on today’s web are largely modeled on the offline commercial world and can be divided into two categories:

• Impulse buys
• Planned purchases

I’ve chosen to concentrate on planned purchases simply because impulse buys are by definition much harder to predict. To simplify things further I’d like to use an example from my own recent experiences:

Stroller Hunting 2.0

Shopping for a stroller isn't child's play... (image by Matt Ryall)

In order to understand how purchasing on the Semantic Web might differ from what we’re currently used to we first need to be aware of our current practices. As luck may have it my girlfriend and I are expecting our first child and since she’s started her third trimester about a month ago we’ve begun dedicating an increasing amount of time daily to hunting for the perfect baby stroller. By “perfect” I men the stroller best suited to our needs and circumstances. This is a textbook “planned purchase” and serves as a great case-study for this discussion so I’d like to take a closer look at the activities we’ve engaged in as part of our stroller hunt:

• Consulted with friends that made the same purchase recently.
• Discussed the purchase between us to define what we’re looking for
• Used Google and other resources to get a grasp of the stroller market.
• Compared stroller prices by using both price comparison sites and our own notes.
• Hunted for stroller bargains on Ebay, Amazon, and others online retailers.
• Posted “Stroller Wanted” ads on second hand and free-swap sites.

Upon analysis the following underlying commonalities can be identified as being shared between all the activities listed:

• They’re all motivated by a clearly defined and obvious need.
• The online activities required we visit specific web services.
• In order to really get the most value from our online activities multiple repetitions over a period of a few weeks were required.
• A certain portion of the time we invested turned out to be a dismal waste.
• All the activities we engaged in required us to aggregate and analyze the data.

The bottom line is that although the Web saved us the effort of getting out of the house to do our research, our online shopping experience turned out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, not much more than a digitally enhanced bargain hunt. Moreover, when the value of the time my girlfriend and I invested in the purchase is added to the price we paid for the stroller we bought, our purchase,  regretfully, ceases to be anything that can even remotely be classified as a “bargain”…
Shopping on the Semantic Web may well be a very different experience.

The Semantic Web Stroller Hunt

A key element to remember about an ideal Semantic Web is that it’s a web of data where everything is perfectly defined and linked, and moreover all the data is  structured and accessible to computers. When all the data about everything is available online and accessible to computers shopping becomes a task requiring not much more than the indication of intent. The research, price comparisons, bidding all become completely automated.

Here’s a vision of what shopping for a stroller might look like on the Semantic Web:

Being pregnant has an effect on both my girlfriend’s, and my own online activities: Tagged pictures of my girlfriend’s pregnant belly are uploaded to Flickr for far away friends to see, gripes about morning sickness start appearing in our Tweets feeds and Facebook status alerts, we both begin subscribing to feeds from parenting sites, etc.

As our due date approaches the volume of these pregnancy related activities steadily increases.

Each one of our actions by itself is nearly inconsequential, but to all-aggregating and all-reasoning Semantic Web the cumulative effect of all of them combined means only one thing: we’re pregnant and ripe for pregnancy related content and… advertising.

Unlike the advertising we experience today the advertising my girlfriend and I are targeted with takes into account our unique needs and circumstances: We’re only offered stuff likely to be within our price range and supplied by vendors shipping to our region. Our online purchases influence the advertising we’re receiving as well: Ads for items we’ve already purchased are removed and replaced with ads for items that compliment and augment the stuff we’ve already bought.

The sum total of the experience is one in which instead of us having to hunt for baby items the Semantic Web makes sure they hunt for us…

Continue reading - Part 2