A post mortem of being featured on chrome web store

Recently podStation was featured on the chrome web store:

I would like to share here what this meant for podStation in terms of numbers, mainly to help other chrome extension developers to understand what happens when you are featured.

Number of views on the Chrome Web Store page for podStation

Before being featured, the chrome web store page for podStation had around 170 visits per day.

During the period it was being featured, the number was around 5000 visits per day.

After it ceased being featured, it has sustained around 230 visits, but it could be because it was being featured in a subsection of the store. Here is the graph:

Number of impressions and installations

Before being featured, podStation had around 60 installations and 60000 impressions per day, 15000 total users.

During the period it was being featured, it had around 800 installations and 1.700.000 impressions per day.

After it ceased being featured it went back to normal installations and impressions per day, and it reached 20.000 total users. It is now going down a bit, but this was expected, as a lot of people probably installed it without knowing exactly what it was.

Number of active extension users

Based on the google analytics I have on the extension UI page and events, before being featured, podStation had around 750 users per day, going up to around 1350 during the period where it was being feature and receding back to around 1000 when the featuring period ceased, although I have to observe the next weeks to see if it will be sustained on the long run.

Why can't I mark episodes as listened on podStation?

I have already received this request countless times, in different variations: Implement a way to mark / hide / archive podcasts that have already been listened.

I would honestly like to have and implement this feature, but there is one main reason I will not do that (anytime soon):

Sync Storage size limitation - 102,400 Bytes - roughly 100 kB, even less then you could store in one of this:

This is the space podStation can use, per user and for free, to store data that is synchronized across computers using your google account.

I created podStation with one main goal: have a good experience playing consuming podcasts on a desktop, while synchronizing your data across computers (i.e.: Home PC and Work PC)

That is why podStation synchronizes for you the podcast list you subscribe to, your playlist and the position (time) of the podcasts you are listening, but it could not safely, within 100 kB, store the information of the list of episodes you have listened :(

I could store this information locally, but I don't feel that the feature would be complete if podStation could not store it on the cloud.

What are the chances for the future?

There is a thing called Sync Filesystem API, which would use space from your Google Drive account, but this API is only available for Chrome apps, not for Chrome extension. You can help by Staring this feature request here and leaving a comment saying this would be helpful, so maybe they will enable it for Chrome extensions as well.

The other option, in case I discover how to consistently make money with podStation, would be to implement my own server side storage.