Chrome Webstore and Entrypoints

I've been randomly thinking about why Chrome has N hundred million users, but some of the popular Chrome Webstore apps like Bejeweled only have 1 million users -- at least a hundred fold difference.  Maybe people really only think of Chrome as a web browser, and don't bother with the app store.  Without people using the app store, and talking about it, there aren't as many entrypoints, and thus fewer chances to pull in more users to repeat the cycle -- a pretty obvious point.  I don't offer any solutions in this post... just posting some thoughts.

To me, the Chrome Webstore has one entrypoint: the new tab page on Chrome.

I've seen ads for the chrome webstore, so I guess that is a different entrypoint, except that it isn't all that different.  It leads to the same spot, the landing page.

These entrypoint links don't highlight any apps in particular -- they rely on the "Featured" section of the webstore landing page.  If none of the Featured apps catch your eye, you'd probably leave.  If you were patient, maybe you would give it another click and dive into one of the categories, like games.  I don't know how many people would really just browse the webstore, because that takes too much time and the list of apps don't change often enough to warrant browsing the store.

How does this compare to other app/online stores?  I've never actually used the iPhone app store, but I've used Android Market, Steam, and of course Amazon.  Between all these stores, really the key is that there are lots of people "linking" to specific apps, and this gets people going to the store. You know what you want. There's no effort.

Sometimes these links are ads, but hey, as long as you know what you think you want, you'll go get it.

Amazon though, is so big that it is a bit special in two ways. (1) I would actually go to Amazon, just to use their search (e.g., to look for toys, or even to look for reviews for products). (2) Amazon gets tons of links from Google search and from product review sites, etc.  I.e., an extended version of word-of-mouth.  The CWS just isn't big enough for any reasonable user to think of doing (1).   For (2), I'm actually not sure that the CWS gets any hits at all from Google search, but maybe the issue is again that it's not big enough and doesn't have enough links to the CWS to make it relevant. (Edit: it looks like it can show up in Google search results: Bastion's CWS entry shows up on the second page of search results).  For example, Mini Ninjas doesn't get any hits for the CWS.  Wikipedia, Amazon, Steam, and Gamestop are on the first page.  The Mac app store shows up around the third.  The rest are FAQs and reviews.  That ranking seems to make sense based on popularity.