Tony Wang7 min readOne Publisher Made 10,362 Chrome Themes: Inside the Store's Theme Farms
Themes are a quarter of the Chrome Web Store. One publisher, Wallsflow, is behind 10,362 of the 75,170 themes — 13.8% of every theme in the store.
Open the Chrome Web Store and it reads like a catalog of software: ad blockers, password managers, tab organizers. But nearly a quarter of it is not software at all. Of the 314,807 active listings in Crawlora's Chrome Web Store dataset (crawled July 2026), 75,170 — 23.9% — are themes: a background image and a color palette applied to the new-tab page, carrying no code and requesting no permissions.
A theme is a legitimate, first-class item type in the store. But it is a different kind of thing from an extension, and it is produced in a different way. An ad blocker takes engineering; a theme takes an image and a manifest. That difference in effort shows up directly in the authorship data — so we faceted the 75,170 theme listings by publisher to see who is actually behind them.
The answer turned out to be lopsided in a way the store's browsing UI never shows you. Chrome's own catalog presents themes one card at a time, ranked by relevance or popularity, and never groups them by who uploaded them. Group them yourself and the market structure snaps into focus: the themes are dominated by a handful of high-volume accounts, and one of them is in a league of its own.
The ranking: who publishes the most Chrome themes
| Publisher | Themes |
|---|---|
| Wallsflow | 10,362 |
| Atavi.com | 1,814 |
| Takato Knights | 1,280 |
| TrawellCat | 794 |
| chromethemer.com | 767 |
| gthemes.org | 547 |
| browservery (facebook.com/browservery) | 505 |
| wallsflowthemes | 361 |
| nosacrifice | 341 |
| paultaylor157915 | 337 |
| garyramirez815852 | 328 |
| donaldthomas700480 | 317 |
The shape of this list is the story. The gap between first and second place is enormous, and after the top few names the counts fall away into the hundreds. The three largest publishers — Wallsflow, Atavi.com, and Takato Knights — together account for more themes than the remaining nine accounts in the top twelve combined. Concentration this steep is unusual for a public marketplace, where you would normally expect a longer, flatter distribution of many small contributors.
Wallsflow: 10,362 themes, one account
Wallsflow publishes 10,362 themes. Against the store's 75,170 total themes, that is 13.8% of every theme in the Chrome Web Store, from a single publisher account. The next-largest publisher, Atavi.com, has 1,814 — Wallsflow carries more than five times that.
Directly below it in the ranking sits wallsflowthemes, with 361 themes. The shared name is hard to read as coincidence: it is a common pattern for one operator to spread listings across more than one publisher account, whether to organize a catalog, hedge against a single account being actioned, or simply as the residue of separate upload runs. We can't confirm common ownership from the dataset alone, but the naming strongly suggests the two accounts belong to the same operation.
The auto-named farm pattern
Look further down the top twelve and a second signature appears. Three of the publishers — paultaylor157915 (337), garyramirez815852 (328), and donaldthomas700480 (317) — carry usernames of the same shape: an ordinary first-and-last name followed by a long numeric suffix. That is what an account name looks like when it is generated in bulk rather than chosen by a person: a name string plus a disambiguating number, minted programmatically at sign-up. Three such accounts landing among the twelve most prolific theme publishers is a strong tell that some of this volume comes from automated account creation, not individual hobbyist designers.
The rest of the top twelve splits along a visible line. Some are branded sites that treat themes as a product line under an identifiable name — chromethemer.com (767), gthemes.org (547), Atavi.com (1,814), and browservery (505), the last of which even points at a Facebook page. Others, like the name-plus-number accounts, offer no such identity at all. Both kinds coexist at the top of the same category, which is the clearest sign that theme volume is being pursued as a repeatable, productized activity rather than a series of one-off uploads by individual creators.
Why anyone publishes thousands of themes
None of this is against the store's rules, and it is worth being precise about why it happens rather than reaching for the word "fraud." A Chrome theme is about the lowest-effort thing you can publish to the store: it is a background image plus a few color values, wrapped in a manifest. There is no code and no permissions — which is exactly why this is catalog flooding and not a security problem. Nobody installing one of these themes is exposed to a script or a data-access request.
What volume buys is discovery. Each theme is a separate store listing with its own title, its own images, and its own URL — a surface that can rank in the store's own search and in web search, and that funnels installs toward whatever the publisher monetizes: new-tab real estate, links, or simply the traffic that a large listing footprint attracts. Publishing thousands of near-identical skins is a distribution strategy, and a legal one. It is the same logic as any long-tail SEO play, applied to a software catalog: one more listing is one more entry point, and the marginal cost of another theme is close to zero.
That economics is what makes the theme category structurally different from the extension category, and why any honest read of "how big is the Chrome Web Store" has to separate the two. A raw listing count treats a permissionless background image and a full-featured extension as equivalent items. They are not — and once you know that 23.9% of the store is themes, and that a single account supplies a large share of those, the headline number means something different than it first appears.
The reason we can measure it at all is that Crawlora exposes the Chrome Web Store as a queryable dataset with publisher and item_type as facets. The store's own interface lets you browse themes one at a time; it does not let you group 75,170 of them by who made them. Faceting does — and once you do, the market structure that the browsing UI hides becomes obvious in a single query.
Query the Chrome Web Store as a dataset
Facet 314,807 listings by publisher, item type, category and adoption — and see who is flooding the catalog. REST and MCP, 2,000 free credits a month, no card.