Do VS Code publishers with more extensions get more installs?

In this sample the median publisher with one extension has 606 installs on it, and the median publisher with eleven or more has 67,362 on their best. The causation is not established: publishers whose first extension worked are the ones who keep publishing.

← VS Code Marketplace data

Does publishing more extensions help?

Median best-extension installs by catalogue size: 606 for publishers with one, 67,362 for publishers with eleven or more. Plus the 100 largest publisher accounts.

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.

The median publisher with exactly one extension has 606 installs on it. The median publisher with eleven or more has 67,362 on their best one — 111.2× as many. The gradient is real and it is also the most over-readable number on this site.

Extensions published	Publishers	Median installs on their best
exactly 1	43,417	606
2–3	5,882	2,432
4–10	1,021	10,861
11 or more	126	67,362

Read the arrow both ways

The tempting reading is “ship more and you will do better”. The data cannot support that, because the people who ship eleven extensions are overwhelmingly the people whose first one worked. Success causes catalogues at least as much as catalogues cause success, and this is a cross-section with no before-and-after in it.

What it does establish is a description worth having: the small number of accounts with real catalogues sit far above the 86.1% of publishers who shipped once, and they are where the installs are.

The hundred largest publisher accounts

By total installs across everything they published, among accounts with at least two extensions in the sample.

Publisher	Extensions	Total installs	Largest	Their biggest
Microsoft `ms-python`	11	665,045,394	231,321,041	Python
Microsoft `ms-vscode`	101	430,224,543	102,296,101	C/C++
Microsoft `ms-toolsai`	11	422,068,598	107,863,168	Jupyter
Microsoft `vscjava`	11	279,835,784	51,498,797	Debugger for Java
GitHub `GitHub`	10	231,147,761	77,371,993	GitHub Copilot Chat
Microsoft `ms-vscode-remote`	6	161,255,440	41,037,432	Dev Containers
Microsoft `MS-CEINTL`	16	137,621,811	54,311,664	Chinese (Simplified) (简体中文) Language Pack for Visual Studio Code
Microsoft `VisualStudioExptTeam`	4	109,503,525	62,155,702	IntelliCode
Red Hat `redhat`	44	105,284,651	56,137,519	Language Support for Java(TM) by Red Hat
Microsoft `ms-dotnettools`	11	97,198,169	42,410,282	C#
Jun Han `formulahendry`	24	94,550,352	41,284,722	Code Runner
Ritwick Dey `ritwickdey`	3	83,742,356	81,100,443	Live Server
Microsoft `ms-azuretools`	17	77,494,866	52,187,714	Docker
Microsoft `dbaeumer`	2	54,525,823	52,100,594	ESLint
Don Jayamanne `donjayamanne`	15	53,640,516	17,050,376	Git History
Philipp Kief `PKief`	5	35,876,442	35,105,738	Material Icon Theme
Christian Kohler `christian-kohler`	2	31,299,647	19,174,119	Path Intellisense
Dart Code `Dart-Code`	3	29,990,488	15,530,370	Dart
ecmel `ecmel`	2	29,501,028	29,481,013	HTML CSS Support
Microsoft `MS-vsliveshare`	2	29,381,871	23,872,063	Live Share
Salesforce `salesforce`	52	27,301,558	2,592,436	Salesforce CLI
Microsoft `ms-mssql`	5	26,331,387	9,588,347	SQL Server (mssql)
DEVSENSE `DEVSENSE`	4	25,801,739	6,947,030	PHP
charalampos karypidis `xabikos`	3	24,667,985	21,873,232	JavaScript (ES6) code snippets
mechatroner `mechatroner`	2	22,946,648	22,945,644	Rainbow CSV
Anthropic `anthropic`	2	22,685,628	22,678,350	Claude Code for VS Code
Xdebug `xdebug`	2	21,912,284	15,536,573	PHP Debug
Street Side Software `streetsidesoftware`	56	21,131,025	17,917,489	Code Spell Checker
Go Team at Google `golang`	2	20,014,142	19,433,227	Go
Microsoft `msjsdiag`	5	17,865,920	10,987,973	[Deprecated] Debugger for Chrome
Matt Bierner `bierner`	20	16,316,676	5,143,949	Markdown Preview Mermaid Support
Pine Wu `octref`	5	15,573,700	15,535,721	Vetur
John Papa `johnpapa`	7	15,476,387	5,438,652	Angular Snippets (Version 22)
Yu Zhang `yzhang`	4	14,325,513	14,216,328	Markdown All in One
Alessandro Fragnani `alefragnani`	14	14,154,003	7,452,143	Project Manager
Jeff Hykin `jeff-hykin`	27	13,759,441	12,710,312	Better C++ Syntax
tomoki1207 `tomoki1207`	4	13,096,173	12,910,873	vscode-pdf
binaryify `zhuangtongfa`	2	12,675,805	12,586,789	One Dark Pro
VMware `vmware`	7	12,258,321	5,752,578	Spring Boot Tools
Database Client `cweijan`	19	12,030,531	4,077,188	Database Client JDBC
HookyQR `HookyQR`	6	11,394,545	10,660,491	Beautify
Matheus Teixeira `mtxr`	5	11,135,705	6,885,670	SQLTools
eg2 `eg2`	2	10,491,663	7,629,514	npm
Sergii N `naumovs`	6	10,228,967	9,574,421	Color Highlight
Material Theme `Equinusocio`	2	10,182,830	5,909,883	Material Theme Icons — Deprecated
Yiyi Wang `shd101wyy`	2	10,000,783	10,000,523	Markdown Preview Enhanced
Mahmoud Ali `akamud`	4	9,968,632	7,278,288	Atom One Dark Theme
Alexander `usernamehw`	15	9,951,024	9,561,380	Error Lens
Thomas Haakon Townsend `tht13`	4	9,840,076	6,667,449	Python for VSCode
TabNine `TabNine`	2	9,725,852	9,611,358	(Legacy) Tabnine
Winnie Lin `onecentlin`	5	9,432,718	4,824,536	Laravel Blade Snippets
Gruntfuggly `Gruntfuggly`	28	8,548,787	7,690,544	Todo Tree
The Rust Programming Language `rust-lang`	2	8,358,333	6,487,914	rust-analyzer
BLACKBOXAI `Blackboxapp`	2	8,232,357	5,328,409	BLACKBOXAI #1 AI Coding Agent and Coding Copilot
Pranay Prakash `pranaygp`	2	7,915,364	7,912,663	CSS Peek
franneck94 `franneck94`	12	7,835,686	7,235,337	C/C++ Runner
Oracle Corporation `Oracle`	14	7,727,195	6,137,269	Java
sarah.drasner `sdras`	6	7,505,642	3,552,838	Night Owl
Microsoft `ms-kubernetes-tools`	6	7,456,997	7,332,069	Kubernetes
HashiCorp `HashiCorp`	4	7,309,419	6,604,153	HashiCorp Terraform
PlatformIO `platformio`	2	7,116,098	7,104,407	PlatformIO IDE
CoenraadS `CoenraadS`	2	6,777,786	6,738,897	[Deprecated] Bracket Pair Colorizer 2
Amazon Web Services `AmazonWebServices`	6	6,777,054	4,952,785	AWS Toolkit
MESCIUS `GrapeCity`	2	6,751,329	6,728,223	Spreadsheet Viewer
CS50 `CS50`	5	6,704,336	3,236,388	Extension Uninstaller
Google `Google`	13	6,697,674	4,988,363	Gemini Code Assist
Burke Holland `burkeholland`	6	6,540,466	6,479,057	Simple React Snippets
Wayou Liu `wayou`	3	6,525,971	6,081,405	TODO Highlight
danielpinto8zz6 `danielpinto8zz6`	2	6,296,862	5,889,414	C/C++ Compile Run
Wallaby.js `WallabyJs`	6	6,231,393	4,397,024	Quokka.js
Damjan Cvetko `zobo`	2	6,012,847	6,012,442	PHP IntelliSense
Holger Benl `hbenl`	4	5,993,977	5,516,494	Test Explorer UI
mcu-debug `mcu-debug`	4	5,978,261	1,585,033	debug-tracker-vscode
adpyke `adpyke`	4	5,859,579	3,886,862	CodeSnap
mrmlnc `mrmlnc`	18	5,782,666	2,188,676	SCSS IntelliSense
sidthesloth `sidthesloth`	2	5,776,183	5,728,389	HTML Boilerplate
Wix `wix`	7	5,774,230	5,490,795	Import Cost
GraphQL Foundation `GraphQL`	3	5,736,270	2,771,157	GraphQL: Language Feature Support
Kiss Tamás `kisstkondoros`	4	5,474,459	4,194,194	Image preview
Wade Anderson `waderyan`	5	5,161,794	3,801,466	Git Blame
austin `austin`	3	5,068,867	5,058,063	C++ Intellisense
Cline `saoudrizwan`	2	4,930,865	4,919,907	Cline
hollowtree `hollowtree`	3	4,929,786	4,811,487	Vue 3 Snippets
Jonathan Carter `vsls-contrib`	3	4,708,402	3,783,040	GitDoc
MagicStack Inc. `magicstack`	3	4,646,774	4,482,867	MagicPython
Peng Lv `rebornix`	13	4,534,990	3,879,590	Ruby
Henning Dieterichs `hediet`	9	4,465,495	4,050,031	Draw.io Integration
Eno Yao `Wscats`	17	4,343,739	1,445,494	Open Browser Preview
REditorSupport `REditorSupport`	2	4,235,809	3,404,167	R
Windsurf `Codeium`	4	4,233,130	3,953,620	Windsurf Plugin (formerly Codeium): AI Coding Autocomplete and Chat for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more
ZainChen `ZainChen`	2	4,124,032	4,104,943	json
Orta `Orta`	10	4,012,064	3,817,895	Jest
Keisuke Kato `k--kato`	3	3,921,172	2,405,883	IntelliJ IDEA Keybindings
Mathematic Inc `mathematic`	3	3,891,505	2,631,605	PDF Viewer
LLVM `llvm-vs-code-extensions`	3	3,846,646	2,985,989	clangd
Anthony Fu `antfu`	24	3,814,399	894,498	Browse Lite
jebbs `jebbs`	4	3,789,735	3,632,550	PlantUML
Adrian Wilczyński `adrianwilczynski`	17	3,744,481	593,897	C# Namespace Autocompletion
brapifra `brapifra`	2	3,717,937	3,151,198	PHP Server
Prisma `Prisma`	2	3,705,188	3,448,963	Prisma

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.
How many installs does a new VS Code extension actually get?By release-year cohort, with the age confound stated rather than hidden.
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.
VS Code Marketplace statistics, measuredEvery headline figure in one place, each one recomputable from the published data.