Add-on store boycotting my add-on after submitting it for being featured?

daxove · June 13, 2019, 11:36am

Hello,
I recently developed an add-on for Firefox. After it gained over 500 users within just a few months I found out that I could now send a mail to Firefox, requesting my plugin to be featured, which I quickly did.

But now, a few weeks later, I looked into my Firefox add-on stats and saw that the downloads dropped drastically from the day I send my mail (see image below)

and my daily users also stopped growing - even shrinking slowly (see image below).
Daily%20users

Could it be that Mozilla/the Firefox add-on store started boycotting my add-on? Is this how the Mozilla team deals with add-ons that they don’t want to feature?
I didn’t think that Mozilla wouldn’t like my add-on as it isn’t anything shady - it helps users gain privacy.

PS: I didn’t want to add the name of the add-on to this post as I don’t want to advertise it in this post. If any member of the Mozilla team wants to know the name of the add-on to look into it, I can provide it.

jscher2000 · June 13, 2019, 7:24pm

Could it be an SEO problem? If you look at your downloads by source, was there a drastic change in the number of search-driven downloads that could be related to terms in the title or description affecting position in the results?

Of course, if most people find it through external search engines, that information isn’t captured in Downloads by Source, all external referrals are treated the same as far as I can tell.

freaktechnik · June 13, 2019, 9:40pm

iirc you can manually set an external referrer with something like ?src=external-mysource. But other than that you get no info on where external people came from.

This honestly looks like you had a link somewhere that got pushed out of the “top” clicks people would follow or just a “big” installation that no longer needed your extension.

caitmuenster · June 13, 2019, 9:57pm

The drop in your downloads likely isn’t related to your request to be featured. Can you PM me the name of your extension? I can look into it from our end.

daxove · June 14, 2019, 8:08am

First off, thank you for taking the time to answer my question.

I did roll out an update that day, but it was only a tiny bugfix that added a missing CSS style. Other than that I don’t think I changed the add-on description in that time period.

I looked into the downloads by source (image below) and it seems like it was only a temporary peek in downloads, first coming from the detail page, then from the search results and now both are back to a lower level.

I still don’t know why the peak ended (and why it peaked in the first place), but at least I now know that it hasn’t originated in my request to feature the extension.