Plugin's total number of users

Question

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find any reference to this here.

Looking at a plugin's stats on the WordPress site, you can see a percentage of versions of your plugin being used. Do you know of a way of getting the total number of users? That would be the 100% of the pie chart ;)

From what I could get on the stats page, the percentages are coming from:

http://api.wordpress.org/stats/plugin/1.0/plugin

But this just returns a JSON with the percentages already there. No total numbers. And the API is not really documented. I could also get some numbers with:

http://api.wordpress.org/stats/plugin/1.0/downloads.php?slug=plugin-slug&limit=max

But this is just day per day downloads. I want to have an idea of how many users are actually using a given plugin. Any ideas?

Answer 1

WordPress.org does not keep stats on how many active users a plugin has. You can only get the number of downloads.

Answer 2

I do not think that this is possible.

This numbers are only calculated by which Version has been downloaded (+1 to the absolute Download statistics) and if an Update changed the Version (-1 to the former and +1 to the current, used for the percentage).

I am not really sure about the second part, but it has to be something like this. Maybe a bit more sophisticated ;)

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell exactly how many Websites run your Plugin, let alone the Version of your Plugin. There are far too many factors of fuzziness (closed systems, unofficial forks, ...) to know the number. You can only make an approximation using the given stats.

Answer 3

The total count of active versions of a plugin are not known.

The percentages are based on the weekly update-checks over the last 7 days of activated plugins.

The repo team suggested that they might release the raw numbers one day.

Source: http://make.wordpress.org/core/2010/10/22/new-and-improved-this-morning-we-have-a/