Forum Growth.....or not?

[AJ Edmondson]

Interesting... I am a member on some other sites (not dedicated to photography) where there are both free and paid forums dedicated to the same topics and my (anecdotal) experience is that the free sites are far more spontaneous and informative than the "paid subscription" sites. In the case of this one, I would pay - if I had to - because I find it far more valuable than all of the others combined. While I go for months without posting, I do "check-in" frequently simply because the constituency of the site seems to be folks I can relate to.
Joel

[rdenney]

The message I just typed got blasted by my hotel internet "service".

Anyway, the thread and posts numbers in Kirk's report are cumulative--they represent the size of the database. Doing the math, the number of posts per month is maybe 20% higher than in the lowest previous periods he reports. The average number of threads per month remains about the same.

Rick "not seeing much of a trend here" Denney

[Kirk Gittings]

3212 active members, as of today. This number has grown by a 1/3 since the last time I checked it in 2012.

[Tin Can]

Exactly!

[MAubrey]

I'm one of the new ones. Glad I joined.

[Willie]

June 2008:
Threads: 32,221, Posts: 340,521, Members: 13,693, Active Members: 2,234

Today
Threads: 51,598, Posts: 524,061, Members: 16,885, Active Members: 2,814


Every couple of years I like to compare the numbers. Steady growth. Why do you think?

No other viable options?

[Ralph Barker]

No other viable options?

Actually there are a few - not many, but a few. We have a substantial overlap of members with APUG. I have no idea what the overlap with photo.net is, however. FWIW, photo.net is what became of the L-Usenet forums, of which this forum was originally a part (rearly to mid '90s time frame), that were run from a university site as an experiment in computer-based social communications. The owners L-Usenet sold it to a commercial group, and it was changed to photo.net some time after that. There's more about the history of this forum on the Home Page (see link in the navigation bar).

[Leszek Vogt]

Oh yeah, it's the Boomers....

There is some "light" forgetting so some of the threads get hit several times....cranking up the stats. Hmm, I guess I fit the age bracket.

Les

[Wayne]

This old thread should be closed.

[Darin Boville]

3212 active members, as of today. This number has grown by a 1/3 since the last time I checked it in 2012.

But the growth has slowed, even as use of the Internet has vastly expanded (though film sales have drastically declined--which offsets which?).

The numbers you are posting can be misinterpreted because of the varying time periods they cover. For example, you've posted numbers for June 2008 to December 2008 (six months), to Dec 2010 (11 months), to Dec 2012 (24 months), to April 2014 (41 months). I'm eyeballing the numbers (while riding shepherd on an intervalometer shoot) and this is what I see:

Active members June 2008 to Dec 2008 (100 additional/month), to Dec 2010 (18 additional/month), to December 2012 (10 *fewer*/month), to April 2014 (9 additional per month).

Anyways, useful to look at the rate of change rather than the cumulative numbers.

In terms of the other categories the number of new threads and posts have experienced slowdowns, too (roughly 35% slower from Dec 2012 to April 2016) than the previous period, on a per month basis).

Unless I've screwed the numbers up!

--Darin