Is creating Chrome extensions profitable?

I've read a lot of discussions about Chrome extension monetization recently, and most are focused on how much people make from them.

But I didn't see many discussions about what's required to create one, and whether or not the initial costs are worthwhile.

I started with the assumption that creating one is a non-trivial amount of work, and that the value must be sufficiently large to make it worth the effort. So I tried it myself, and I wanted to know more, so I asked around.

A few things I learned: The most efficient way to find out about the size of the task at hand is to do it yourself. After I had a rough idea of how long it would take me to do my first extension, I made a rough estimate of the total amount of time it would require. I compared this to my other freelance business, and to the amount of time that I spent writing a similar Chrome extension, and calculated how much this time was worth.

There were a few assumptions I made here. For one thing, I estimated a certain amount of work, for example, formatting code, that I found tedious and time consuming and that I couldn't really give a dollar figure for, based on that activity alone.

Second, I considered it reasonable that the Chrome extension market is large enough to allow for a range of compensation, but not too large that the people running Google's advertising department feel confident in making an across-the-board price for an extension to avoid being accused of undercutting competitors. Here's a chart that summarizes my data and reasoning. It's important to note that my estimates for the cost of doing a Chrome extension are conservative, but don't account for time that isn't explicitly accounted for, such as writing documentation. There are four distinct steps in the creation of a Chrome extension. I thought it might be useful to break down the total time it took me to do my first Chrome extension into four distinct steps. Each of the steps is listed below, along with a breakdown of how much time each one took, and how much it's worth.

The final value of each part should be fairly self-explanatory.

Can you build your own Chrome extension?

If you can, why would you want to?

If you can't, at least not by the standards Google expects. So Google decided they needed a new way to train their developers. As our product continues to evolve and expand, it has become increasingly important for us to create a new training mechanism. Currently, we rely on classroom-based training sessions, where the instructor leads the learners through a set of steps with handouts and other materials, Nick Nguyen, the product manager for Chrome, wrote in a blog post announcing the new program.

The old system was less fun, according to Nguyen. And It also tends to get out of date over time as people move on to new jobs and roles, or move onto the next phase of learning.

In other words, it's a tool for streamlining how Google builds its apps, and that's really useful. But it's a lesson in the limits of automation.

If anyone can build your own Chrome extension, it's probably me. (I should know, I built one.)

What's in a Chrome extension, anyway? Extensions are a way for users to interact with the web, through small bits of code called scripts. For example, an extension might allow you to bookmark certain pages or give you a shortcut to a website you need to visit every day.

As far as you and the web application you run in a browser, there's not much to an extension besides the scripts you write and the bits of data you store in your browser. Why would anyone want to build their own Chrome extensions? Maybe you're an SEO professional who wants to keep track of which sites link to which other sites. Or maybe you're a security researcher trying to analyze how to crack open websites. Or you want to see if any scripts on a page are malicious. Or you just want to be a more efficient user of your browser.