A 1,000-user Instagram comment export plugin: no promotion at all, just took the top spot in store search

In an old category with a dozen similar tools and a top product at only 10k users, a Chrome extension that launched in July took the #1 spot for "export instagram comments" through its title, its rating, and steady updates. It now gets a dozen-plus new users a day. What's worth studying isn't the extension itself but the way it grabs long-tail keywords in the Chrome Web Store.

Jul 16, two 5-star reviews

On Jul 16, 2026, "Export Instagram Comments – Excel, CSV & JSON" was listed on the Chrome Web Store. Two 5-star reviews arrived that same day: one says "work prefectly, export Reels comments of what I want", the other "Absolutly good, so fast to save all the comments, I like the export history feature". Three more came over the next five days. On Jul 19 someone wrote "time saver... I really like the csv format", and on Jul 21 another said they used it to "pick the luck user of my posts", meaning to run a giveaway draw. Each review has a developer reply signed muzi wu.

That first week it had only a few dozen users. By Nov 6 the store showed 1,000 users and a 4.7 rating (13 ratings). Searching "export instagram comments" in the Chrome Web Store, it ranks first, ahead of every older extension with no "Featured" badge.

What it is

An extension that exports comments from Instagram posts and Reels to Excel, CSV, or JSON, running in your own browser. The store page states it plainly: "Export IG Post/Reel comments to Excel, CSV or JSON. Pause/resume large exports, view history, and choose optional fields."

Two main types of users: influencers running giveaways who need to pull comments and randomly pick winners, and outreach people who want to turn commenters into a contact list. The Instagram app can't export comments, and Meta's official API only returns comments on your own business account's posts, not other people's. That gap is why this category of extension keeps getting used.

The growth curve: no single spike

According to third-party tracker extops.dev (11-06 reads):

Users grew by 823 over two months, and 30 over the last 375 days, roughly +5 to +40 a day. It had one small pullback in late October (894→884). There's no spike, unlike a viral post, press coverage, or bought ads. It looks more like store search delivering users steadily every day. The store now shows only rounded numbers after 1,000, so the exact count will only be visible once it crosses the next threshold.

Where users come from: store search, nothing else

We couldn't find any off-store mentions on Google, X, Reddit, Product Hunt, YouTube, or TikTok, and the store page doesn't even link to a website. Nearly all users come from in-store search on the Chrome Web Store. 11-06 tested it on the US store:

• "export instagram comments" #1
• "instagram comment export" #1
• "ig comments excel" #1
• "instagram comments" #1
• "export comments" #2

Four things stacked up to earn those spots:

The name is the search term. "Export Instagram Comments – Excel, CSV & JSON" contains the verb, the object, and all three formats, so any way a user searches will match. By comparison, "Comments Exporter", which has 5,000 users and the same 4.7 rating, has a name too generic to rank for this query.

The store page is translated into 55 languages. Users searching in any language's store interface can find it.

The competition is unmaintained older extensions. The results behind it are a batch launched 2021–2024 years ago: WeBooster's Comment Exporter (10k users, 3.4 rating, not updated since January 2025), ICommentExporter (10k users, 1.7 rating), Ins Comment Exporter (3.2 rating), and InsCommentExport (2.6 rating). It sits at 4.7, and it released a new version in Nov 1, so among a row of dull results it looks like the one still alive.

It pushed the rating up in the first week of launch. Of the 8 reviews visible on the store, 6 are bunched between Jul 16 and 21 (one of them is a plugin promo vendor pitching its service). They're all short English 5-star reviews, and two have spelling mistakes. By Sep 1 the app had only 177 users but already 9 ratings, a rate of about 5%. Over the next two months the user count grew by over 800, but ratings added only 4, about 0.5%. The early batch is most likely seeded launch reviews *inferred*, meant to make the rating look good from day one.

The developer's store name is JakeMan, with a registered address in Barcelona, Spain, but the replies are signed muzi wu, which is likely an overseas account used by a Chinese developer *inferred, not verified*. The same account also publishes "YouTube NonStop" (launched in April, 7,000 users), which likewise uses a search term as its name.

Where the money comes from: export is free, contact data is paid

The money sits outside the extension, on the pricing page at commentexport.store (11-06):

"Advanced profile lookups" means pulling commenters' public email addresses, phone numbers, and follower counts. An influencer running giveaways might use it a few times a year, and a $4.99 pack covers that. The people who actually pay monthly are those using comment sections as lead lists for outreach. The export is free as bait. The contact data is what gets sold.

Revenue isn't disclosed. A rough estimate, based on 1,000 users, a 1%–3% paying rate, and a mix of the two tiers, is a few hundred dollars a month *estimated*. It's a small business, not a big one.

Who's competing

The category is old and crowded: at least a dozen similar Chrome Web Store products have over 1,000 users, and the top one has only about 10k, so no one is clearly dominant. On the web there's also ExportComments.com (multi-platform, paste-a-link export, #1 on Google search), Lection, and CommentPicker, which pull traffic through Google SEO, plus Apify, a scraping platform for developers.

Two others worth a look:

• CommentGrid (launched April 2026, 5,000 users, 4.1 rating): multi-platform, with AI analysis and giveaway drawing, public pricing, and tutorials on YouTube to attract users. It's a content-driven approach, the opposite of this one.
• New copycats following behind: For 11-06, the #2 search result is "IG Comment Helper – Export Comments to Excel" (0 ratings, just launched), and #10 is "IG Comment Exporter – Instagram Comments to CSV". Another, "Comment Exporter for Instagram™", launched the same day. They may not be copying it specifically, but the title pattern is identical.

Its own features (pause/resume, download history, field selection, three speed tiers to avoid bans, local processing) are small improvements that others could build in a week or two, and users never see them until they click through from search results. Features determine whether people who arrive stay, not where they come from.

Can you ride it?

Building another Instagram comment exporter isn't worth it: the #1 spot is taken, the #2 spot is being contested by new extensions, and the whole pie tops out at 10k users.

What's worth taking is the playbook itself. It shows that in the Chrome Web Store you can find a long-tail tool keyword where the top results haven't been updated in years, rate below 4, and come from no big company. Then you make the title match the search term, translate the store page into dozens of languages, build the rating to 4.7+ at launch, and ship an update every few weeks. Within a month or two you can hold the #1 spot in store search, and users keep arriving without any promotion. The playbook has no barrier to entry, so each keyword's ceiling is low, and no one can hold the position for long.

If it were you

C · You can learn something here, but building another Instagram comment exporter isn't worth it. Treat the playbook as a template and use it to cover several long-tail keywords at once, which is where the real opportunity is.

Who it suits: a solo developer who can write Chrome extensions and is willing to run three to five small tools at once, accepting tens to hundreds of dollars a month per tool and stacking them up by volume.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone hoping one extension will support them; anyone wanting to build a comment exporter for Instagram itself (the spot is taken, and new extensions keep arriving); anyone unprepared for the risks of Instagram account bans or page changes. When Instagram changes its page structure, this whole category breaks at once.

How to do it: In the Chrome Web Store, search each keyword you're considering and check the top five. A gap exists only if their ratings are below 4, the latest update is over a year old, and none has a "Featured" badge. Comment exporters for TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, and Reddit all exist, but most are also poorly maintained, so check them one by one. Keep the core free, charge separately for the valuable data you pick up along the way (public emails, phone numbers, follower counts), and offer both a one-time pack and a monthly subscription.

How to get users: No off-store promotion needed. Put the search term plus the format in the title (something like "Export X Comments – Excel, CSV & JSON"), localize the store page into dozens of languages, get real users to leave a few reviews in the first week, and ship a new version every few weeks.

Timing: There's no seasonal window, but others are already using the same title pattern, so every keyword gets more crowded the longer you wait. The Instagram keyword is already late.

Looks like I misread it: ① over the next two or three months it couldn't get past 2,000 users. That means the total size of this keyword is small, and no matter how good the play, the ceiling stays low. ② Several same-name extensions launched around 11-06 pushed it out of the top search spot within a month or two. That means the spot can't be held, and you lose it as fast as you win it. ③ After the Instagram redesign, extensions in this category broke en masse and ratings dropped below 3 stars. That means the platform risk is bigger than it looks.

Data and sources: Chrome Web Store listing, review, and search pages (US store, 11-06); user and rating curves from extops.dev (11-06 reads); pricing page at commentexport.store (11-06); competitor user counts and ratings from the Chrome Web Store. Anything marked "estimated" or "inferred" is an estimate or inference.