Downloads Statistics at AMO

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ShareBird
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Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by ShareBird »

Have you guys and girls also noticed a significantly decrease in downloads from your themes at AMO?
Have they changed something in the way they count the downloads?
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jivko
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by jivko »

ShareBird wrote:Have you guys and girls also noticed a significantly decrease in downloads from your themes at AMO?
Have they changed something in the way they count the downloads?


I sure did.My Blue Fox theme lost around 10 000 lately.I don't know if this a bug but I'd be happy if someone clear things up.Or maybe people are no longer interested in custom themes. :( This personas feature is stupid.I hate it.
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Jeff.Tet
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by Jeff.Tet »

whats your dashboard saying?
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by patrickjdempsey »

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ShareBird
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by ShareBird »

Patrick, I don't think these issues are related to that bug. I'm noticing a gradual decrease on the downloads number since April... You can check the Silvermel's Dashboard: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/7517

So, Silvermel is still more or less at the same "place" at the popular lists what leads me to think every other themes have also a decrease in their downloads. I remember to have seen, e.g., the Nasa Night Launch theme with 80,000 downloads and now it has only 40,000.

I don't think this is caused because of Personas per se but certainly the Themes discrimination has something to do with this. Despite all promises made by the developers to "fix" the issues, absolutely nothing was done in this direction until now. Even at the new Add-ons Manager I can't see those issues being addressed.

From the original issue about the "Get Themes" link at Add-ons Manager pointing to the Personas site, the only thing they have done was to add a link to the themes section at AMO on this page: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/
If you search carefully you will notice a small "Explore Firefox Themes" at the bottom of the page. Notice that they did this intending to fix the "Get Themes" link problematic. Too bad that the link on Add-ons Manager point to a totally different site: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/gallery/All/Popular with absolutely nothing about "real" themes...

I don't know... Maybe they are really going to fix the "Themes discrimination" problems, but when?? At the meantime, because all of these things, themes are suddenly disappearing... Maybe in the future there will be nothing more to be "fixed".
Last edited by ShareBird on May 7th, 2010, 8:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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malliz
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by malliz »

ShareBird wrote:I don't know... Maybe they are really going to fix the "Themes discrimination" problems, but when??

ShareBird wrote:At the meantime, because all of these things, themes are suddenly disappearing... Maybe in the future there will be nothing more to be "fixed".


Answered your own question I think. When 3rd party themes are gone so will the discrimination.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I've been noticing a slide in downloads as well. Particularly, all of my add-ons had their all-time high downloads and daily users in February, with both sets of numbers dropping since then. This is all really weird. But I think it's a big compound problem. On one hand, AMO is counting statistics differently, but the curve for that should look like a bump down, followed by gradual rising at the rate they were before. Instead, I'm seeing the opposite... no noticeable sudden bump-down and instead a gradual reduction in users over 2 months. It is possible that the Personas lock-out of third-party themes is THAT detrimental?
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by jivko »

Well I don't know about the daily users.My Blue Fox theme statics show that I'm losing and getting users from time to time but since 1st April I'm losing downloads https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/10849 .Weird thing about the users is this.The statics show that on 16th April the theme has around 128 000 users.On 18th April it has around 144 000 users and between those two days it got around 2500 downloads.What's this?I got 16 000 new users and 2500 downloads.Where are these users coming from?I know that the Amo counts inactive users as well.I think that their counting system is broken.
About Personas:People prefer this garbage because you can install it without restart.It's easy to make and it has a variety of skins(more that 30 000 skins or something).Finally the Get Themes Button.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by patrickjdempsey »

A very strange thing... my themes, Silvermel and your Blue Fox theme all have a big spike on February 18th, after which the numbers start gradually going down. So what happened on February 18th? was that a glitch?


jivko, the AMO counter can only count people who are online and (I think) have add-ons updates turned on (or manually run the update checker)... at least that's my understanding, it counts individual IP's when Firefox runs the update scanner. The weekly dives in Daily Use numbers represent the weekends when users are not using their work/school computers. Mondays and Wednesdays tend to be the most active days and Saturdays tend to be the least active days. So really, the most accurate portrait of your add-ons Daily Use would probably come from averaging the results for Tuesdays and Thursdays and forgetting the rest of the data... but I don't know anything about creating spread sheets to be able to do that automatically.

Spikes in Downloads usually occur on the day after a new version goes public and a big batch of people get automatically updated. Sometimes these spikes will also coincide with getting some press via a website or reaching the front page of AMO/all themes, and trailing off if you get bumped off of the front page. And of course, the Downloads numbers only reflect downloads from AMO, so if you have your theme hosted on another site as well, you may have some downloads not accounted for.

We've discussed before the possible negative impacts of the following, and I wonder if we are seeing the net result:

- Personas locking-out third party themes.
- Firefox 3.6 Get Themes button redirecting to getpersonas.com.
- Confusing use of the word "themes" to describe Personas in press releases and on official Mozilla websites.
- Removal of Themes from the Recommended add-ons list on Addons.Mozilla.Org.
- Corresponding removal of Themes from the Recommended list in the Get Add-ons dialog within Firefox.
- Non-alphabetic Categories list on the Addons.Mozilla.Org main page.
- Repeated aspersions by Mozilla high-ups in press releases that Themes could be a security and stability risk despite the reality that many of the "Recommended" extensions are known to have stability and performance problems.
- Mozilla's refusal to make Themes swappable without restart even though ShareBird has proven that it's completely possible by creating SwitchThemes in a very short development period:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/61769

BTW, those policy changes and some of those press incidents all happened within a very short time period this winter, so it's really hard to ignore them as being happenstance.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by jivko »

You may have a point about the users.I agree with you about the custom themes.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

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jivko
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by jivko »

ShareBird wrote:I've filed a bug on it:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566124


Thanks for adding this bug. :D Although I think that this unwanted issue may not be a bug.Think about it.If I'm someone who doesn't like restarting Firefox and the themes available on the Firefox site what would I do? :roll: I know :idea: I'll take a look at Personas.Wow I don't have to restart and it takes less than 10 minutes to make my custom skin.
I think that Personas is responsible for the bad statics. :? :( Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by patrickjdempsey »

jivko wrote:
ShareBird wrote:I've filed a bug on it:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566124


Thanks for adding this bug. :D Although I think that this unwanted issue may not be a bug.Think about it.If I'm someone who doesn't like restarting Firefox and the themes available on the Firefox site what would I do? :roll: I know :idea: I'll take a look at Personas.Wow I don't have to restart and it takes less than 10 minutes to make my custom skin.
I think that Personas is responsible for the bad statics. :? :( Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it.


I think it's likely that many new users don't even know that Themes EXIST due to their removal from mention. However, the point of the bug is not that our numbers have flat-lined, it's that prior to a certain point all of us had a steadily increasing number of users and after a certain point we have a steadily decreasing number of users.... that's a bit strange don't you think? Also note that prior to Personas built into 3.6, Personas and Themes worked together and Mozilla's decision to not support that forced users to choose one of the other, which may account for some, but certainly not ALL of the losses we are seeing.
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by aaron »

jivko wrote:If I'm someone who doesn't like restarting Firefox and the themes available on the Firefox site what would I do? :roll: I know :idea: I'll take a look at Personas.Wow I don't have to restart and it takes less than 10 minutes to make my custom skin.


Is it really that big of a deal to restart Firefox? My word. It's not like it's the end of the world, maybe 60 seconds on a slow machine....

And 10 minutes to make a 'custom' skin with Personas? Sure, if you only want toolbar background images. To me, that is window dressing, and not a theme.

But whatever. What do I know? I've been doing themes for Mozilla products since 2001 -- back before Mozilla Suite 0.9 was out, back before Firefox or Thunderbird were even in existence. I made themes for Firefox when it was still called Phoenix. I'm getting to the point where I don't know if it's worth my while anymore to do themes for Mozilla products. Would be sad to let it go after all this time, but I'm getting closer and closer to that point.
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ShareBird
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Re: Downloads Statistics at AMO

Post by ShareBird »

I've just filed the bug to investigate if it is an issue at AMO end. I've found a little weird that a lot of other downloads statistics show the same curve...

If it's not a script issue, than we can be sure that is the result from the "theme discrimination". As I said before, Personas "per se" should improve the interest for this type of customization, just think about if personas would work with third party themes, if the link on Add-ons Manager would point to the themes page on AMO and so on...

I think then this bug could be a bug track with dependence bugs that could solve this issue... For example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520124
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