Blogs

It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. We've now passed 86,000 members! We're also more than ten years old!

Rather than simply give the usual monthly traffic snapshot, I thought I'd give the data for the whole decade, which tells quite a story. 

• First, some amazing totals:
  • More than 20 million users and 118 million pageviews over the decade. 
  • 13,400 blog posts
  • More than 60,000 discussion threads
  • Nearly a million comments
• Second, the ups and downs of this industry. Over the ten years, we've gone from one of the few drone communities around to today, when there are hundreds of sites, most of them commercial, and drone users and developers are scattered amongst them. In the early 2010s, DIY Drones was in the top three results on Google for "drones". Now there are pages and pages of commercial sites before it. That's a natural thing and demonstrates classic maturing of an industry. The amateurs have given way to the pros.
• Third, the related rise and fall of "DIY" in the drone industry. With the triumph of DJI and its Phantom (and now Mavic and Spark) lines, it's no longer necessary to build your own drone. This is a good thing (the same happened with PCs and all sorts of electronics before it), and many people still choose to do so anyway for fun (as they still do with PCs), but it's clearly gone back to a niche activity or one for developers, much as it was in the early days. 

Today, we're still a big community with healthy traffic (about 10,000 visitors and 15,000 page views a day). And we'll continue just as we are for many years to come. We won't be the biggest site in this space, but we'll continue to be one of the most interesting and a friendly, high-quality place to talk about ideas and projects that extend of potential of drones to change the world. And have fun doing it!