AMO Extension Popularity
2008-05-23 17:52 - Tech
For a while now, the AMO site has tracked popularity not only by downloads, but by "update ping" frequency. They've made the data available in an attractive interface, for example here's the statistics for Tiny Menu, my most popular extension. At the time of writing, it shows 270k downloads and 53k active daily users. That seems like a lot, which makes me somewhat proud. But is it a lot?
Over two hundred extensions make their statistics visible to the public, as I do for all of mine. So, I can answer that question rather well. I downloaded the statistics for all the public extensions, and started some figuring. For the most recent day available, I had 244 different data points available. Sorting them by frequency, I saw the standard long tail distribution. There's a single extension with just one daily user, and this number grows slowly. There are 144 (59%) under 10,000, and 224 (92%) under 100,000. Then there's the outliers. The top three are 552k, 1.2m and 4.0m live users. So I divided them up into exponentially sized bins to build a histogram. Grouped together that way, the data becomes:
| Bin Max | Frequency |
|---|---|
| 10 | 5 |
| 13 | 1 |
| 17 | 2 |
| 24 | 3 |
| 33 | 6 |
| 49 | 5 |
| 76 | 3 |
| 123 | 4 |
| 210 | 9 |
| 379 | 12 |
| 733 | 14 |
| 1,525 | 20 |
| 3,439 | 20 |
| 8,492 | 22 |
| 23,181 | 40 |
| 70,738 | 34 |
| 244,325 | 19 |
| 968,348 | 6 |
| 4,471,786 | 1 |
Which produces this histogram:
So it turns out that Tiny Menu is actually in the most common category, by that grouping. It's not all that many users. Overall, it comes in at 203 of 243, which is certainly up there, but there are of course much more popular extensions out there.
