We at Variti specialize in traffic filtering, that is, we develop protection against bots and DDoS attacks for online stores, banks, media and others. Some time ago, we thought about providing limited functionality of the service to users of various marketplaces. Such a solution should have been of interest to small companies whose work is not so heavily dependent on the Internet, and which cannot or do not want to pay for protection against all types of bot attacks.
Choice of marketplaces
We initially opted for , where they uploaded an application to combat DDoS attacks. Among the most popular Plesk applications are WordPress, Joomla, and Kaspersky antivirus. Our extension, in addition to directly filtering traffic, shows website statistics, that is, it allows you to track the peaks of visits and, accordingly, attacks.
Some time later, we wrote a slightly simpler application, this time for . The application analyzes traffic and shows the share of bots on the site, as well as the ratio of users with different operating systems. The idea was that marketplace users would be able to see the share of illegitimate traffic on the site and decide if they need a full version of protection against attacks.
cruel reality
Initially, it seemed to us that users should be interested in applications, because the share of bots in global traffic has already exceeded 50%, and the problem of illegitimate users is discussed quite often. Our investors also thought the same, they said that we should go to cloud services and look for new users on the marketplaces. But if Plesk brings at least a small but stable income (a few hundred dollars a month), then CloudFlare, where we made the application free, disappointed. Now, a few months after its release, only about ten people have installed the app.
The problem is primarily in the low number of views. Interestingly, in percentage terms, everything is fine: two-thirds of the people who went to the application page installed it and began to analyze traffic. At the same time, it is not clear how things are going for other services present on the marketplace, since neither CloudFlare nor Plesk provide open counters, and therefore it is impossible to see the number of downloads, and even more so visits, on the pages of other extensions.
It can be assumed that there are, in principle, few users on marketplaces. A year or two ago, we spoke with an investor who invested in Plesk, and he said that he sold his stake in the company at the first opportunity due to unfulfilled expectations. The investor assumed that the future lies with such marketplaces, and the service will fly, but this did not happen. Our experiments also confirmed the falsity of such hopes.
Of course, there is a possibility that if you start working with application traffic and attract new customers there through marketing, then interest in extensions will grow and revenues will become more significant, but it is obvious that magic will not happen without significant efforts, and these services will fully won't earn. Although when we tell someone about applications, everyone agrees that the idea is interesting and useful.
Perhaps the point is in the specifics of our service: we are competitors with CloudFlare, and it is possible that the company does not allow similar services to grow in search results. Maybe it's because of the high competition: now everyone says that you need to go to marketplaces, and because of the large offer of other extensions, users cannot find us.
What's next
Now we are thinking about how to update the functionality of the application and open access to CloudFlare clients not only to analytics, but also to protection against bots, but based on the current situation, this makes little sense. So far, we have settled on the fact that the effectiveness of the marketplace was a test of the hypothesis whether the extension would work without additional promotion on our part - and it turned out that it did not. Now it remains to understand how to attract users there, and whether additional traffic will be useful, or whether it is easier to abandon such sites.
Source: habr.com