30.000 downloads of yaVDR? We're nearly there!
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02. March 2011
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yaVDR
Since the first version of yaVDR was released in January 2010, yaVDR ISO images were downloaded 28.549 times until the end of February 2011... Therefore we expect to hit the 30.000 download mark this March.
Counting internet downloads is an error-prone and imprecise craft. But our vanity and our sanity tell us to care for those numbers, and we try to count in a conservative way. It's a source of motivation, and it's also reassuring that what we do is somehow useful, for us and for other people.
Today, we would like to share these numbers with you, to give us all an overview on where we stand today with our project yaVDR that is now a little bit older than one human year.
Pure download numbers don't tell us how many downloads were started and never finished. They don't tell us if the person downloading the distribution is also really using it. But looking at them over many months, it's an indication if our users still trust our work and are happy to reinstall again and again and again.
For our latest release yaVDR 0.3, it's a special situation: Users of yaVDR 0.2 could update to yaVDR 0.3 quite easily just by package updates. So there was no necessity for them to download the ISO image of yaVDR 0.3. Still, the download numbers were quite high again. There are already more than 10.000 downloads of yaVDR 0.3 and that is more than there were for yaVDR 0.2 so far (8.739). Two assumptions to explain this situation:
- It seems that quite a few users are re-installing yaVDR on a regular basis. This doesn't happen because they are bored, but because they believe that this is the easiest way to fix their configuration problems. There is a slight chance that those people also re-download the ISO image.
- Somehow, the word about yaVDR being worth a try is spreading, although we didn't experience major publicity for yaVDR 0.3 (except for a couple of international blog postings - thanks to all the blogger out there for talking about yaVDR!).
Next to the download numbers, there is a second source of information: The visitors of our website. We are proud that about 47% of the visitors are international visitors that don't belong to the established German VDR community (with still a majority of them being European). This means, that our decision to offer this website in English language is working out. Multilanguage documentation is still painful to maintain for a small project like ours, but maybe we can improve this over 2011 with the help of our community members. There are already attempts to do this.
The left pie chart above doesn't really tell a lot about the "ingredients" of the big slice called "Others". Therefore I'd like to add the details here: The Top 15 places where our visitors come from: Germany (53%), USA (9%), Finland (4%), France (4%), Russian Federation (4%), Austria (3%), Italy (3%), Netherlands (2%), Spain (1.9%), Poland (1.7%), Switzerland (1.6%), Great Britain (1.5%), Sweden (1.x%), China (0.x%), Czech Republic (0.x%)
Thanks to all these curious people, we constantly have a high amount of visitors on our website. Before the release of yaVDR 0.3, we had about 18.000 to 24.000 visits per month, after the release of yaVDR 0.3, it increased to 21.000 to 31.000 visits per month (peaks being the release months June and October). For the whole of 2010, we had more than 200.000 website visits. That's a nice confirmation that our work is interesting for others.
Thanks to all people out there using and supporting yaVDR! Many thanks to GWDG for hosting our ISO images! Many thanks to the admins and moderators of vdr-portal.de and to all developers within the VDR universe who spend hours and hours developing VDR, VDR plugins, addons, etc. Without you there would be no yaVDR.
There are exciting new things coming up regaring yaVDR during 2011. Stay tuned!
16. March 2011
I like those numbers. Great work from you guys.
What I don't like is that Portugal isn't on the list of the most visits source. I have the ideal way to change that: promote yaVDR in several of my sites, dedicated to VDR, XBMC, Media Center in general and other geeky matters.
Keep up the great work.
h.udo