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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…