Breaking Down the Chrome Web Store: An Exploratory Analysis of Extensions | Hacker News Reader

Breaking Down the Chrome Web Store: An Exploratory Analysis of Extensions

extensionmonitor.com

19 pointsflysonic1014 comments

I’ve had RSS Feed Reader (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...) for soon to be 10 years on the Chrome Web Store. AMA

Did you every consider making money from it? If yes, how did it go?

> SUPPORT US BUILDING FEEDER BY GETTING FEEDER PRO: https://feeder.co/

We have a premium upgrade for users of our SaaS product, that's doing well. You can read about that business here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/feeder

I appreciate the detail in your privacy policy.

- Do you collect browsing history? Do you sell it? - How many companies have offered to buy the extension from you? For how much? - Have you tried publishing an in-app or in-store paid version? - Is the "User generated information" encrypted at rest?

We do not collect browsing history, and we do not sell it. Because of how RSS works we need the permission "Access all data on any site", but we're

We have been approached by big web data collection companies to sell the browser data generated. (Even by a big speaker company with two products of the same name ;) In one very dark moment many years ago we actually did integrate with one of those providers. They promised +3000 USD net per month of passive income, but in reality it netted about 1k USD per month. We had it in around 1.5 months before I removed it because I just felt too dirty. This was in very dark moment of my life where I had given up on a lot of things, I regret it heavily. By no means is that an excuse, but I've learned from it and will never consider anything close ever again.

We've gotten so many offers over the years. The first one was actually a legitimate acquisition offer by our now biggest competitor, the actually just wanted the product as an addon :)

But after that it's just been shady gmail-addresses with fake names, but also big Israeli data collection companies that use and sell aggregated data. The offer has been anywhere from 1000 USD to 50,000 USD, but I always felt that this extension was the closest thing to fulfilling my dream of a small software business where I'm my own boss.

It seems GDPR really killed this business, because we have not gotten any legitimate offers from real companies since.

We do offer a SaaS version, in addition to the local-only version, which we monetise with upgrades. It's just like Feedly or any other SaaS RSS reader. The local-only version we do not read the user generated data.

I appreciate the openness about this.

Some highlights:

- 50% of the 188,640 extensions have less than 16 users/installs

- 13 extensions have over 10m users/installs

Zipf Function / power law distributions.

Comparison: G+ Communities, by size (log-log scale):

https://joindiaspora.com/people/d8210c0de509264f/photos/2830...

How do they collect this data? Do they have chrome store crawlers?

Yeah they must. I wrote one once too to power this: https://extstats.appspot.com

I wrote it to track our competitors (I used to work at HubSpot) but you can add any other extension in the drop down on the left.

What happened to it?

Also, how do you deal with duplicately named extensions?

Yes

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