Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers

Upcoming changes for add-on usage statistics

4 responses

We’re changing the way we calculate add-on usage statistics on AMO so they better reflect their real-world usage. This change will go live on the site later this week.

The user count is a very important part of AMO. We show it prominently on listing and search pages. It’s a key factor of determining add-on popularity and search ranking.

Most popular add-ons on AMO

However, there are a couple of problems with it:

  • We count both enabled and disabled installs. This means some add-ons with high disable rates have a higher ranking than they should.
  • It’s an average over a period of several weeks. Add-ons that are rapidly growing in users have user numbers that are lagging behind.

We’ll be calculating the new average based on enabled installs for the past two weeks of activity. We believe this will reflect add-on usage more accurately.

What it means for add-on developers

We expect most add-ons to experience a small drop in their user numbers, due to the removal of disabled installs. Most add-on rankings on AMO won’t change significantly. This change also doesn’t affect the detailed statistics dashboard developers have access to. Only the number displayed on user-facing sections of the site will change.

If you notice any problems with the statistics or anything else on AMO, please let us know by creating an issue.

4 comments on “Upcoming changes for add-on usage statistics”

  1. Charles wrote on

    > …We expect most add-ons to experience a small drop in their user numbers…
    Usage number for themes will fall hard, and they are “most” of the add-ons, no?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Lightweight themes are the majority, yes, but their usage stats are calculated separately. They won’t be affected by this change (I failed to mention that). Usage for complete themes will fall significantly, though, but there aren’t many active themes now.

      1. Stephen wrote on

        TBHall this script is about 1week old to me and im getting lost at times and dont know what im on with illget there eventually and its 10 times what google is cos i dont intend on using google or facebook once i get my head around this so just saying thanx and keep it going buddy

  2. Simon wrote on

    Regarding disabled add-ons, yeah, that’s a good policy – and one of the ones in your screenshot used to be a good example of why. The current versions of VDH are pretty good, but I had a lot of problems with memory leaks in earlier versions, such that it was safest to leave it disabled 99% of the time, and turn it on only when I wanted to use it.