Transparency Report of November 2022

This is the 42rd 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.

💰 $7,866.49/$37,608.28 (fairly compensated for time)

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

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What Happened This Month

Downloads

I was previously tracking active install growth here, but that was removed unilaterally at the end of September 2022.

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

Website Visits

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

Freemius Stats

Freemius gathers other stats about sales and sites using the plugin.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

Besides a ton of bugfixes (many around hyperlinks in Pro Print) and compatibility improvements (e.g. with JetPack, Google AdSense, Kadence Blocks, and Creative Minds’ Table of Contents), the main feature that got released was improved image quality control.

Improved Image Quality Control

In PMB 3.19.0 (released to Freemius at the end of November but not yet released on WordPress.org) gives users more options around image quality. Previously, there were usually only 4 image quality options: “Don’t Change” (default), 150×150, “Full Size” and “Uploaded Size”. Now, depending on your WordPress theme and registered custom sizes, there are at least 7 sizes (10 in my screenshot with the Mantra theme active).

Also, previously if an image size didn’t exist for a particular image, it would end up being blank. This was fixed to instead use the next available size up (as determined by the HTML srcset attribute set on the image).

So, if you want to reduce the filesize you can use smaller resolution images, or if you want the largest available use the Uploaded Size, or balance the two out by choosing an option somewhere in-between.

I Know What Freemius Stats Mean Now

Since WordPress.org removed the Active Installs growth chart a month or two ago, I’ve been more reliant on Freemius stats, so I thought I would finally clarify what some of the stats mean (e.g. where it says “Active Sites” is that sites that newly installed my plugin, or is that total sites still using my plugin, regardless of when they activated it?)

I put my findings in a post on my blog, but the important gist is this:

• “Opted-In Sites” is the total number of sites that were opted in during the time period requested (e.g. when looking at stats from November 2022, this is all the sites that opted in between the start of November 1st and the end of November 30th, which was 207)
• “Active Sites” are all the sites that opted in during the time period that are still active at the time of viewing. So, of the 207 sites that opted-in during November 2022, 95 were still active when I took the screenshot of the stats on December 8th. This also means that this sta for November 2022 will change if I look at the stats in a year from now (because some of those sites were be inactive or have deactivated my plugin).
• “Uninstalled” and “Deactivated” are all the sites that opted in during the time period that have since uninstalled or deactivated the plugin. So, of the 207 sites that activated my plugin in November 2022, 99 uninstalled it (either during November 2022 or in the first few days of December, when I took the screenshot) and 13 deactivated it (again, at any time).

So this month’s stats show I had, as of December 8th 2022, 95 new sites using my plugin in November 2022. However, this does not show me how many users from previous months uninstalled or deactivated my plugin during November 2022. So it’s not an exact replacement for WordPress.org’s old “Active Install Growth” chart.

It does give me some information the “Active Install Growth” chart didn’t: I know that about half of all users who activate my plugin will stop using it within a month.

Many folks use PMB to print their entire plugin (like the plugin name implies you should) and then don’t need it, so deactivate it. So to some degree this is expected. But I suspect it might not work well for some users, so they deactivate it rather than try to debug what’s going wrong and get it working for them.

I shared my post with fellow Freemius plugin developers, and it was pointed out that Freemius has a new stats page with lots of improvements, but I noticed a few bugs (for one thing, I told me I had negative 500 sites using my plugin). So, once that’s working better I’ll switch to using it.

Thinking Out Loud

I didn’t manage to finish my instructions video for making a book and eBook on Amazon with PMB. It was part of what motivated to improve the image quality feature (I wanted the printed copy to use the uploaded image size instead of the optimized-for-web “Full” size).

I have since finished it and will be uploading it though.

What’s Next?

Besides uploading that tutorial I just mentioned, I doubt I’ll accomplish much with the holiday season coming on this month.

But once I do, getting the Print Buttons to work with Pro Print will be quite high on my priorities, as it’s come up a few times in support requests this month. It’s just quite a large undertaking that I admit I haven’t totally figured out.

Anyways, thoughts and feedback welcome!