Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd. delivered more vehicles in 2014 than ever before in its 111-year history, marking the fifth consecutive annual sales record for the ultra-luxury brand. via yahoo finance

definitely in the wrong business.

helo and welcome to the 4th in a series of year-in-review articles about the numbers that make your favorite multipurpose toolkit that is vvvv. new to this? for last years rant see: vvvv-in-numbers-2013

webwise

so lets first have a look at where you come from. as you can see for the second year in a row the first 4 spots have not changed. the exciting bit happened with japan which climbed into the top 6 and settled on spot 5. 脱帽! shall we say thank you to minouser and team for creating their vvvvook? oh, 確かにどうもありがとうございました.

the number of unique visitors still seems to increase though it gets harder and harder to tell due to a constantly growing number of spam (most of which you luckily don’t get to see). on a normal weekday vvvv.org has ~1500 unique visitors. on march 6th 2014 it had 61.410 and not a single one of them bought a license! so i removed that number from the total amount for 2014 and still we see quite an increase compared to the years before:

my guess: the number of non-spam unique visitors did indeed increase. just probably not as much as the number pretends (>50k) but rather in a range of ~15-20k like in the years before. sigh.

i spare you the sad details about what browsers you’re using. when will they ever learn…

the spam-attack also destroyed the session-overview of the whole year. what you see below is starting from march 7th and compares 2013 (orange) and 2014 (blue).

you had even less interest in vvvv.org during the summer than last year but then made a strong finish towards the end of the year. see the strange spike (marked) end of november? that was when the combined tags of #vvvv and #photoshop in a facebook posting attracted >13.000 people to have a look at vvvv.org according to the click-stats of facebook. speaking of which: na, couldn’t care less..

this diagram shows we had a sharp decline in questions asked in the forum. and also all other numbers regarding using features on the website (blog, screenshots, shouts) went down (i’ll omit the depressing shot of those stats). the only numbers that went up were new and edited wiki-pages, ie. we put quite some effort in our Documentation and also the translators, most notably h99user (italian) and sebescudieuser (french), were quite active. grazie mille et merci beaucoup for that indeed.

and apart from the wiki-documentation robotantonuser has continued his дотошный work on the \girlpower demo patches shipping with vvvv. i can only hope that those efforts have at least contributed to the diminishing numbers of questions asked in the forum.

downloads

probably the best indicator of a user-count is the downloads because spambots don’t do that. then of course every download is not an individual user but still we can make out two things from the statistics:

• less downloads overall: bad.
• slightly better ratio of people getting the addonpack as well: good.

* x86 and x64 combined

flattr

as we often heard that people wanted to support vvvv even when using it non-commercially (nobel) early in 2014 we added the possibility to support our development via flattr, a practical and simple way to give and accept micropayments. and really all of the 17 people who requested that, flattred us at least once. some even multiple times so that in the first year we earned 30 flattrs worth 74.60€. now stop laughing already and get yourself an account and join in. then try here, it is fun: /downloads|vvvv actually a value of 2.48€ per flattr is quite something. like for example a slice of pizza at our downstairs dealer. very much appreciated.

if you’re still not convinced. just have a look at the download-numbers again. if every download was a flattr we’d actually fly quite high. don’t mistake the actual numbers we have so far with the potential this can have if people understand that it is a good thing to support something you like/use/benefit from not just with a +1/like but some actual micromoney. the crowdfactor then does the rest.

also remember that other vvvv users and contributors can be flattred as well. here are the stats:

1. vuxuser 95 from 23 people
2. tonfilmuser: 38 from 10
3. joreguser: 35 from 10
4. woeiuser: 27 from 10
5. westbamuser: 25 from 11
6. elliotwoodsuser: 25 from 7
7. velcromeuser: 8 from 3

8. microdeeuser: 6 from 2
9. u7angeluser: 3 from 3
10. gregsnuser: 3 from 2
11. eliasuser: 2 from 1
12. colorsounduser: 2 from 2
13. dottoreuser: 1
14. robotantonuser: 1

makes a total of 299 flattrs which i’d like to argue is not nothing. still of course should be at least 10 times as many but it is a start. and btw flattr has announced improvements to their service. looking forward to those.

licenses

now first the bad news. as you can see the blue bar is below even its level of 2009. even though for the first time it includes the numbers of our new big business mainstay that is El Protektor. hmm…how can we talk that up..?

how about like so: licenses were bought by 81 (thats one more than just eighty) different companies from 17 different countries on this wonderful planet. compare this with the previous three years:

• 2013: 69 companies from 17 countries
• 2012: 61 from 18
• 2011: 52 from 19

see a trend there? mhm, apparently more and more companies out there are using vvvv and are so happy with it that it feels totally natural to them to pay for their licenses. so proud of you people! (that just gave me the chills). so ja, if everyone just concentrates to get that number up, the other numbers will follow…

here is how the licenses spread over the world. germany and the uk hard to compete with in the top ranks. but then, switzerland made it again to spot three and most amazingly japan doubling its share. 驚くべき! あなたの努力のためにもう一度感謝 minouser and team.

hey usa, glad to see you back on the ranks. according to website-access-statistics you should be on rank 2 though, or are you just doing all the spamming?

all in all you see we are facing some gravity, but thats exactly why on april 28th this year we’ll release our second album!. why did that take so long? hey it took guns’n’roses 15 years to release their last album. clearly good things take a while..

in the meantime get your node15 ticket and prepare for the best. so much looking forward to seeing you all again in frankfurt this year, horray. thanks for every single bug report that helps us polish vvvv and thanks for all your contributions that make vvvv so much more valuable to everyone than we could ever make it alone.

nur das beste im neuen jahr. yours, vvvv