Transparency Report of June 2023

Overview

This is the 49th monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin, documenting my journey to be fairly compensated for my time and reach 10,000 active installs.

💰 $ 15,384.25/40,674.28(fairly compensated for time)

🖥5,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)

What Happened This Month

Downloads

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

Steady growth, but still haven’t moved off MailChimp to get emails going.

Website Visits

Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)

Another up month for readers, the post on making Word Documents being the most popular by far.

Freemius Stats

Sales

Not as high as the previous two months, but still high compared to last year.

Another small refund this month (someone upgraded from a single-site to a multi-site license, but that doesn’t actually cancel the original single-site license, so they requested that be refunded which seemed reasonable.)

Even split between Professional and Hobbyist payments this month. I’d like more Professional payments, but oh well.

No real big change in renewals.

Monthly is still quite a bit more popular the annual licenses this month, suggesting I could make the annual discount even more drastic, but I think a 70% discount is already pretty extreme.

I made a significant increase the 5-site license discount which had no effect (from 5-for-the-price-of-2 to 5-for-the-price-of-1.5). I don’t think the problem is the price itself, but either that folks just genuinely don’t need it (they really only have one site) or they aren’t aware of it (the sales page doesn’t make it obvious enough.)

Audience

Significant increase in growth this month (it’s been a while since growth has been this positive).

Many more activations this month, and only slightly more deactivations.

No new information from the plugin version stats.

WordPress 6.2 is now majorly ahead of all other versions.

PHP 7.4 most popular, but all the 8s are shooting up.

German is becoming big enough that I’m starting to freshen up on it using Duolingo!

Dutch doesn’t even rank again, even though last month it was appearing to be growing a lot. So I probably won’t be adding a translation for that.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

Set Maximum Image Size in Word Documents

A professional-level subscriber requested how to remove images from their Word Documents in June. For the PDF designs, there’s a setting to specify the maximum image height, and if you set it to 0, the images get removed entirely. So I added that feature to the Classic Word Document Design, too.

Maximum Image Height for the Classic Word Document Design\

It turned out later, that same subscriber realized they actually did want to keep some images– the post’s featured images. That request seemed too specific to be generally useful, so I gave them a bit of custom CSS that would achieve that, as follows:

img:not(.pmb-featured-image){
    display:none;
}

Word Document Table of Contents Now Shows Nesting

The Word Document’s Table of Contents used to ignore nesting (parts and their sub-sections were all displayed at the same level) but in 3.25.1 that was fixed. Sub-sections now appear indented under their part.

From the PMB User Manual, the “Getting Started” part has multiple sub-sections (like “01. Overview” and “02. Start a Project”). All those sub-sections are now indented like in the project content editor, PDF formats and ePub format.

This is done by changing the heading level: so in sub-sections, all level 1 headings (h1s) become level 2 headings (h2s), and all level 2 headings (h2s) become level 3 headings (h3s).

Giving More Credit to Contributors

I recorded two new contributors to PMB this month. One was Ryan Van de Kamp who helped improve PMB’s Japanese translations (also an old high school friend of mine who moved to Japan), and the other was Viktor Szépe who a few years ago volunteered to set up my plugin with Composer and PHPStan. Thanks!

Thinking Out Loud

Ok Back up to 5,000 Active Installs

PMB lurched back over the 5,000 active installs mark in June (after falling down to 4,000 in May). I think both happened as a result of May’s release of admin print buttons. The new feature added buttons to the post admin page and the admin posts list page to quickly create a PDF or other format of a document with PMB. I suspect some users didn’t intend to ever use it, and didn’t like it, and might have even forgotten they had PMB installed because they only used it once, so uninstalled PMB.

Conversely, June had the highest growth of PMB since I added the Freemius integration, which I think may also be related to that new feature. I think new users are liking it (most users of my plugin actually want the print buttons for printing individual posts), and so more are keeping the plugin active now.

Graph showing PMB’s growth since I introduced the Freemius integration in November 2020. The several months of negative growth, starting in August 2021, was actually when I disabled the Freemius Opt-In screen, which resulted in nearly no opt-ins. Because Freemius wasn’t recording any opt-ins (and therefore no activations), but it did report deactivations (everytime someone deactivated it and chose to report why it still recorded as a deactivation), there was a net major increase in deactivations.
Anyway, you can also see a significant spike up in June 2023 towards the very end, which is what I wanted to highlight.

What’s Next?

The thing I hoped to do last month: migrating from MailChimp to Mautic. But with the kids on holiday for two months, and me working from home, it’s possible that won’t happen.