Progress report for 2023-11 (November 2023)

What is this post about?

At the end of each month, we publish a report for patrons on the status of the project and the work done that month.

There is no guarantee that we will be able to spend much time on the project each month, but overall we hope that this will give more transparency to the people supporting the project.

Progress Report for November 2023.

This month we spent a total of 15 hours working on the project.

Most of the time was spent reacting to the sudden death of omegle - the most popular video chat site, which was the main focus of our work over the past six months. This event has had a big negative impact on the project's roadmap, but the development of the extension will continue - at a much slower pace.

We also added a new "autostop after skip" feature to the COMC platform (ome.tv, chatruletka, minichat, chatrulez) and tried to promote our free Patreon membership, which for now only allows people to subscribe to public posts.

What's the impact of the Omegle death?

The project is in a bit of an identity crisis right now, as the death of omegle has caused most of our long and short term plans to just suddenly disappear. It may take years before we can get back to the previous growth rate of the extension's user base.

The death of omegle has had almost no impact on the number of daily users and api requests. The only problems here are the future growth and vectors for the development of both extension and patreon.

According to Google's internal dashboard, analytics shows a 70% drop in impressions across the Chrome Web Store and a 35% drop in page views.

The install/uninstall dynamics have not been particularly affected, but this is more of a temporary phenomenon caused by a large number of users switching from Omegle to ome.tv and looking for an alternative to the other Omegle extensions they were using.

We also lost a clear development vector and monetization plans that were unique to omegle and not compatible with ome.tv and other lesser known omegle alternatives.

What's next?

The development and support will continue, but we need some time to think and to deal with the fact that a lot of the work over the last few months just evaporated in one moment.

We plan to deliver 'patron badge' and 'patron shout-out' functionality, translation into more languages and a few new features for ome.tv in the coming weeks / months.

We would also like to rework the blacklist and statistics functionality, but we'll have to see if we can reliably integrate a local database for these features.

We also need to engineer a system of basic privacy-focused analytics to at least know how many users are online on different platforms, to roughly understand the dynamics.

We're also going to try to add at least basic support for more omegle-like chat platforms, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong.

Conclusion

Omegle's death has brought a lot of negative impact, but our project will cope and develop further despite all the difficulties.

Most likely we will have to improvise on the fly and come up with something new in the future.

Thank you all for your support! We have recently reached 100,000 active users and we probably wouldn't have made it without your help.

I hope to see you next month!

qrlk