Joomla Extensions Profit

Joomla Extensions For Profit

In the past, I took interest in Joomla web development.  It led to the addition and modification of free and paid extensions. Eventually, with more practice, I took interest in the creation of Joomla extensions; both free and commercial. When you add extensions to the Joomla directory, you are required to provide links to the downloads and a link to the forum. Over the course of 3 years, more than 44,000 views existed in my most popular extension. The extension had a free and commercial extension.

In a nutshell, the numbers went like this:

44,000 views for an extension in the directory.

That led to about 12,000 downloads for all versions of that extension, which was about 25%. Overall sales was less than 10.
I had built 2 other commercial extensions and the numbers were all under a 1% conversion.  In this case, a conversion was a sale.  Since I had bought many extensions and knew they were worth the few dollars by comparison of others, I took it as a positive experience for web development skills, but a negative to keep on the track for commercial extension development.
After seeing and reading several reports from other developers who received almost nothing is donations vs number of downloads, I leant towards Joomla extension development as a bad idea for trying to make an extra buck.

After analyzing my forum and reading many other developer forums, I reached a personal conclusion for which most people trying to build applications with the Joomla CMS were trying to do it freely using code they knew nothing or very little about. Asides from gathering data and enjoying helping others, the forum positives were outweighed by the negative users who had no problem asking for help and thought a free extension came with unlimited free advice.  

Another personal contradiction to allowing free extensions for downloads is the fact that you can allow non-programmers to compete with you since they may sell web development by using extensions for which the customer thinks they are brilliant, but, they are just adding free code which took no programming knowledge.

This does not conclude that creating Joomla extensions is valuable for nothing. I am sure some very elaborate extensions are profitable. Also, creating extensions could have some positive spin-off like getting the attention of the employer when applying for a web development position.

February 11, 2012 by kent