Transparency Report of May 2023

Overview

This is the 48th 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.

💰 $ 14,603.88/40,335.28(fairly compensated for time)

🖥4,????/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.

Good growth… but still haven’t managed to find time to move off Mailchimp and I’m not willing to pay the rate they require.

Website Visits

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

A bit of growth in terms of visits. Still relatively large amount of traffic to the post on making Word Documents. It’s obviously a popular topic I should hone in on.

Freemius Stats

Sales

No giant sale like last month (over $1000) meaning sale were down, but the second best month yet (I think the record before last month was around $800).
Subscription renewal amounts were up quite a lot.

A few more payments than last month, and one small refund (I think they forgot to cancel their monthly subscription, but said they planned to use PMB again.)

Professional licenses are doing better, earlier pricing adjustments may have helped (made them slightly cheaper and Hobbyist licenses more expensive).

Slight improvement in renewals.

Annual license growth is accelerating, which I also hoped the pricing adjustments would do (I increased the annual discount on some licenses a ton.)

Last month there were two 20-site license payments, but one (the big one) was an annual, which I won’t see for a year (if they renew, I don’t think I’ve seen them using it or having any questions yet 😨 which isn’t good). I’d like to see more of those 5-site license purchases… I had thought “5-for-the-price-of-2” would be convincing enough, but apparently not. I’m increasing the discount to “5-for-the-price-of-1.5”. See what that does.)

Audience

A bit more growth than last month. Nothing to write home about.

Still lots of churn.

I dunno, lots of versions.

WordPress 6.2 overtook 6.1 (apparently I missed that last month? I recorded it was looking likely but hadn’t happened yet.)

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

No big change in countries.

Dutch still relatively high for languages.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

Added Admin Print Buttons

The new “admin print buttons” let you quickly get a document from a post, page, or custom post type.

A business client had requested a quicker way for their clients to make Word Documents from custom post types, I’ve been hoping to add that for a while, and I see it as a step towards improved front-end print buttons, so took the plunge and made it happen.

So, from any post, page, or custom post type, there are now buttons to generate a print page for each format (Digital PDF, Print-Ready PDF, ePub eBook, and Word Document). The buttons appear on both the post editing page, as well as the post list page.

Posts list page showing the new links to generate PMB’s various document formats.

I admit the buttons can be a bit cluttery, so there’s an option to remove them for any formats and post types desired. The settings are on PMB’s “Settings” page,

PMB’s Settings page now has “Admin Print Buttons” settings to only show the buttons on certain post types, and for certain formats.

I decided to default to showing the buttons on all post types and include all formats seeing how I see this being useful for most plugin users and in-line with the plugin’s purpose.

However, I’m ready to admit I’m wrong, although no one has commented on these new links. (The number of active installs reported on WordPress.org fell from 5,xxx to 4,xxx this month though, so maybe users “voted with their feet”, but I think that may have been coincidence.)

New “Designs” Page

The new PMB “Designs” page

Along with the new Admin Print Buttons, there’s now a need to change the default design for each format (because the Admin Print Buttons always use the default design.)

Changing the default design can be done from the designs page by clicking “Make Default” next to any design. Hopefully that’s simple enough.

There’s also a link to “Customize” a design from here, which takes you to a page just like the “Customize xx Design” on a Pro Print project. This is just so users of these Admin Print Buttons don’t have to jump through any hoops to customize a design (like make a dummy project and edit its design.)

So far no one’s complained about this new page. I hope it’s an asset.

Mayer Magazine Adds “Post Content” Setting

The Mayer Magazine got an signficant new feature: an option to edit what post content is included for each post in a project.

Mayer Magazine Digital PDF Design’s new “Post Content” setting.

The options for Post Content are just like they are on all the classic designs: post title, ID, author, published date, categories and tags, URL, featured image, excerpt, custom fields, and content.

This was requested nicely from a user and it turned out to be pretty easy.

I had originally thought “Mayer Magazine is an opinonated design, if you want to change what post content it includes, you need to talk to a designer.” But I’m coming around to how easy customization options like this are helpful, because getting a designer or coder to edit a bunch of HTML and PHP files is an order of magnitude more work.

I’m open to adding many more of the Classic Designs’ settings to the non-Classic Designs (e.g., control of page dimensions, margins, etc.) but just need to prioritize it.

Thinking Out Loud

4,xxx installs to 5,xxx

PMB’s WordPress.org page now shows 4,000 active installs.

😭 PMB got bumped down to 4,000 active installs this month. It happened (maybe coincidentally) after introducing Admin Print Buttons, so it’s possible it was a backlash to that. Or it might be a coincidence: active install growth has been slow basically ever since I introduced PMB Pro.

Does this mean the plugin is abandoned? Fortunately, plugin revenue is steadily improving still. So I’m not sure how much to worry about this. I hope finally improving front-end print buttons (the most popular use of PMB) will help improve active installs.

What’s Next?

Hopefully migrating from MailChimp to Mautic. It will be a bit technical, but nice to get automated emails back up, and I think MailChimp priced itself out.