How many installs does a new VS Code extension get?

In this August 2026 sample, the median extension first released in 2026 has 24 installs, and 73.3% have fewer than 100. Install counts are cumulative, so older cohorts are higher largely because they are older.

← VS Code Marketplace data

A new VS Code extension’s realistic first year, by cohort

Of 12,338 extensions released in 2026, the median has 24 installs and 73.3% have fewer than 100. Cohort table back to 2015, with the age confound stated.

Read this before quoting anythingThis is not a census and it is head-biased: each category was paged from the most-installed downwards until a cap, so the tail below the cap is missing. Every “under N installs” figure here is therefore a floor, not an estimate — the true share is higher, because everything the crawl did not reach lies below everything it did.

Of the 12,338 extensions in this sample first released in 2026, the median has 24 installs and 73.3% have fewer than 100. That is the base rate a new extension is launched into.

Released	Extensions	Median installs	Under 100
2015	564	6,390	0.0%
2016	1,285	18,620	0.0%
2017	2,559	7,419	0.6%
2018	3,340	4,278	1.0%
2019	4,660	3,118	2.1%
2020	5,684	2,250	3.2%
2021	6,467	1,534	4.7%
2022	6,390	1,089	6.7%
2023	6,477	898	9.0%
2024	5,888	578	15.8%
2025	8,812	220	32.6%
2026	12,338	24	73.3%

Most of this gradient is age, and saying so is the point

Install counts are cumulative and never decrease, so a 2016 extension has had ten years to collect them and a 2026 one has had months. A table that presented this as “older extensions are more successful” would be reporting the calendar.

What survives the confound is the part a prospective publisher actually needs: the distribution of outcomes within the newest cohort. Being in the newest cohort is not a disadvantage you grow out of on a schedule — it is where 73.3% of entrants are still under a hundred installs at the moment of measurement, and the crawl is head-biased, so the true share is higher.

The other direction the confound runs

Because the sample is paged from the most-installed downwards, the crawl reaches deeper into the tail of a small category than a large one, and reaches recent extensions mostly when they are already doing well. Both effects flatter the newest cohorts. The numbers above are therefore an optimistic reading of a new release’s prospects, not a pessimistic one.

All of it, free. One JSONL row per extension, the same data as CSV, the machine-readable summary, the crawler that produced them and the list of rows withheld because their publisher id has the shape of a credential. CC BY 4.0, DOI-archived, no signup and no email. extensions.jsonl extensions.csv the repository

The rest of this dataset

Do star ratings predict how many people install an extension?They point the wrong way. Five-star extensions have a lower median install count than three-star ones, and the reason matters.
The most-installed VS Code extensionsThe top 250 in this sample, with publisher, category and last-updated date.
How many VS Code extensions and publishers are there?What this crawl found, what it could not reach, and why the difference matters.
Is it worth publishing a VS Code extension?The base rate a new publisher is actually competing against, stated plainly.
How much of the VS Code Marketplace is abandoned?Share not updated in twelve months, by category — and why the stale ones are the bigger ones.
Does publishing more extensions help?Median best-extension installs by how many a publisher has shipped.
VS Code Marketplace statistics, measuredEvery headline figure in one place, each one recomputable from the published data.