It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's a big 73,000!!!!
There were approximately 1.2 million page views in the last month! (we now get around 40,000 page views a day on average). It took us just 34 days to add these latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 49 minutes!
Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially to the administrators and moderators who approve new members, blog posts and otherwise respond to questions and keep the website running smoothly.
Regards,
TCIII Admin
Comments
@Thomas
"I believe that the DIY Drones website is now moving into the "quality" over "quantity" phase."
That very well could be both the case and the goal- only folks who were heavily involved 2-4 years ago could suss that out.
However, it conflicts with many other posts here giving optimistic numbers about growth.
Knowing that most here are likely to be "fact based", I figured I'd chime in with my experience in the numbers rackets.
Many of the forums let you see the "active members" - and it's truly amazing that in very large communities (10's or 100's of thousands), the really active folks often number in the dozens...
On my forums I still have less than 13,000 posts myself (since 2008 or so), while some of my favs - some admin and some not - have 30,000+
Did I mention I love those guys? Especially because the 30,000+ ones have been nice to everyone in all of those posts.
Now...there are/were some who tried to work up their counts by replying to excess numbers of posts with "yeah, good point". Most of those guys self-destructed.
I survived only because I gave up on trying to compete - post and information wise - to the top community members and admins.
(FYI, that site is hearth.com - ask me anything about wood heat).
:-)
Hi David,
Amen to that!
Regards,
TCIII Admin
My theory is people are just buying RTF machines and flying them with no knowledge as to how they work. Maybe they are better off than I am. I always get a bit nervous when I fly because I understand how everything must work properly together and what can happen if there is a problem. The new "drone " user just thinks everything will always work just fine.
Regards,
David R. Boulanger
@Craig,
I believe that the DIY Drones website is now moving into the "quality" over "quantity" phase.
Regards,
TCIII Admin
Bill Bonney has it closer to correct IMHO - ever since 1994 people have been publishing misleading web stats including "hits", "members", etc.
The sad fact is that the DIY end of the hobby is declining and doing so quite rapidly. Worse yet, there are many more players (vendors) serving the market so it's very difficult for the small business who enjoyed a hobby/income by providing stuff to the community.
Having spent many 100's of hours studying web stats (for over 20 years) - and would note the following....
1. Overall page views to DIY drones have dropped over the past 4 years - despite the vast amounts of new people entering the hobby. That's a contrary indicator to Chris's optimism.
2. The number of members means absolutely nothing - and I say that having started a forum with 43,000+ members. This number includes people who signed up 3,4,5 etc. years ago and may have never posted or returned. The number of posts and page views does mean something - but you have to be careful and sort out who the active members are - that is, I've seen forums where a dozen active members have created a vast percentage of the posts and comments. It's probably that 100-200 members here (and in most forums) that do most of the posting. In fact, the top 50 or less are usually buttressing any site.
3. All google trend (search) information shows the tide turning (out) in regards to DIYdrones - both the activity and the site. I'm not framing this as a good or bad thing - it just is. But with 8-10X as many people interested in drones - and with less people here or caring about DIY - you don't have to be a stats person to see the trends.
For those interested I have laid out a bunch of the numbers and charts related to the so-called "dot-drone bust" at this article.
http://www.droneflyers.com/2015/12/metrics-and-indications-for-dot-...
Whether we like it not, Google doesn't lie (much)....
Not to be pessimistic here - the DIY branch of the hobby has a bright future. My point is that it will not be measured by surging sales or tens of thousands of active members online. It's a niche and most active hobbyists probably have limited time for online discussions.
I quote Thomas +1!
At 30,000 members pageviews are increasing to the 50,000/day pageviews http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/diy-drones-hits-the-big-three-o... is the near the end of 2012.
It peaks and then is almost a flat line to about middle 2014, which then starts a slow decline to consistently below 50,000 at the end of 2015 ie trending downwards.
The time people are spending on the site is down from 4m21 (2012-30,000sign ups) to 3m35(73,000 signups) over that same period of end of 2012 to now.
This would indicate the same number of active users from the end of 2012, but they are spending less time on average reading the content.
Interesting to see the results as posted in february after this holiday season bonanza in drone purchases.
+1 :)
At this rate, we should hit the 75k membership mark around early February 2016.
Regards,
TCIII Admin