Read the Docs Blog - Posts tagged stats

Read the Docs 2020 Stats

2021-03-17T00:00:00Z

2020 was a rough year for everyone, including our team. We managed to make it through, and continue to have 5 folks working full-time to make Read the Docs better for you.

We are going into 2021 with a new grant, which will require us to do some hiring. We also launched our EthicalAds network, which is bringing our approach to sustainability to the tech community as a whole.

As we have for the past 7 years, we are proud to share our 2020 stats post.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 are also available.

Page Views

Our stats:

580 Million Page Views (from 465 million)
156 Million Unique Visitors (from 120 million)

These numbers are not completely accurate, since we implemented Do Not Track support our analytics pageview figures understate our actual traffic. We estimate that around 6% of users are not counted here. We also don’t count all the users who block Google Analytics with a browser extension.

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

240,000 projects (from 200,000)
430,000 users (from 400,000)
2,480,063 builds (from 10 million total last year)

We have been battling spam quite heavily again this year, so these numbers are a bit skewed. We do notice a uptick in usage across the site, both in terms of support and traffic.

Community

This year, we had:

14 people who committed code to the main repository (from 21)
3636 commits (from 4793)
532 issues - 104 open, 428 closed (from 609)

We have been working to move user support issues to email from GitHub, which likely addresses the reduction in ticket numbers. We are also working to expand our ecosystem of projects, so the commits to the main repository are down. We expect across our theme, extensions, and other projects commits are up this year, and we’re appreciative of all the work people contribute.

Funding

$234,000 advertising (from $249,000)
$30,000 Gold users and donations (from $26,600)
5 paid staff (same as last year)
We have additional revenue from our commercial offering at readthedocs.com, but aren’t including that in our community funding overview

With the launch of EthicalAds, we are excited to continue to grow our advertising business, and expand it to the larger community. We are also seeing continued growth of our paid product at https://readthedocs.com, which is allowing us to fund further growth of the Read the Docs codebase for all our users.

Conclusion

We continue to work to improve Read the Docs for our users. We’re excited for the growth we expect in 2021, and hope that you’ll join us for the next chapter of our story.

The Read the Docs Team

Read the Docs 2019 Stats

2020-05-14T00:00:00Z

2019 was another good year for Read the Docs. We continue to have a team of 5 folks working on the project, and we’ve rolled out a number of new features for the year.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published since 2013. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 are also available.

Page Views

Our stats:

465 Million Page Views (from 400M)
120 Million Unique Visitors (from 77M)

These numbers are not completely accurate, since we implemented Do Not Track support last year, our analytics pageview figures understate our actual traffic. We estimate that around 6% of users are not counted here. We also don’t count all the users who block Google Analytics with a browser extension.

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

200,000 projects (from 100k)
400,000 users (from 150k)
10,188,182 builds (new this year)

We have been battling spam quite heavily again this year, so these numbers are a bit skewed. We do notice a uptick in usage across the site, both in terms of support and traffic.

Community

This year, we had:

21 people who committed code to the main repository (from 28)
4793 commits (from 3774)
609 issues - 80 open, 529 closed (from 797)

We have continued to have a similar team working on the project this year, but have actually made more commits. We moved our support queue from issues to email, which likely accounts for the lower issue count. We’re quite happy with our closed issue stats this year, which are much better than previous years.

Funding

$275,000 in revenue from readthedocs.org (from 294,000)
$249,000 from advertising (from $278,000)
$26,600 from Gold users (from $16,000)
We have additional revenue from our commercial offering at readthedocs.com, but aren’t including that in our community funding overview

Our advertising has been pretty steady for 2019. The small drop in the year-over-year comparison we account to the fact that ad blockers happened halfway through 2018, meaning that the comparison is 15% lower in terms of our total traffic.

We continue to be hosted by Azure, and we’re using a lot of their nicer feature to keep our costs down. You can find some posts on our blog about this.

Conclusion

We continue to keep working to improve the documentation ecosystem in the software industry. We’re excited about a number of new features that we’re working on this year, and expect to continue to be a resource you can depend on for a long time to come :)

Read the Docs 2018 Stats

2019-01-08T00:00:00Z

2018 was another good year for Read the Docs. We’ve settled into a sustainability model that is working for us, and have a team of 5 folks working full-time on the project.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published for the past 6 years. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 are also available.

Page Views

Our stats:

400 Million Page Views (up from 338M, 18%)
77 Million Unique Visitors (up from 75M, 3%)

These numbers are not completely accurate, since we implemented Do Not Track support in May, our analytics pageview figures understate our actual traffic. We estimate that around 6% of users are not counted here. We also don’t count all the users who block Google Analytics with a browser extension.

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

100,000 projects (up from 77k, 30%)
155,000 users (up from 103k, 50%)

We have been battling spam quite heavily again this year, so these numbers are a bit skewed.

Community

This year, we had:

28 people who committed code to the main repository (up from 23, 22%)
3774 commits (up from 1058, 257%)
797 issues - 189 open, 608 closed (up from 513, 55%)

You can see the number of commits and issues has gone up quite a bit. This is largely because of the additional staffing we have had on the project, allowing us to be more active to both our users and to release more features.

Funding

$294,000 in revenue from readthedocs.org (up from $218,000, 35%)
$278,000 from advertising (up 59%)
$16,000 from Gold users (up 16%)
We have additional revenue from our commercial offering at readthedocs.com, but aren’t including that in our community funding overview

The biggest impact to our revenue this year was our ads being blocked. This happened in May, and caused an initial 32% reduction in our ad revenue. We were added to the Acceptable Ads list later in the month, which regained around half of our revenue. So for the second half of the year, our ad revenue was down about 15%.

We are also exploring sharing revenue with our documentation authors. There are currently 3 projects enrolled in a revenue share, and we’re hoping to expand that in 2019 to better support open source projects.

The project is now on firm financial footing. We have a cash reserve that will allow us to pay all of our staff for more than 3 months in the event of a loss of revenue, which allows us to be more flexible with our revenue going forward. This funding allowed us to expand from 4 to 5 full-time folks working on the project.

We also moved hosting to Azure this year in August from Rackspace, who both have sponsored our hosting.

Conclusion

This year we’ve continued to invest in our ethical advertising approach, growing our team by one member and building lots of new features. It feels like the project is progressing quite well, and we’re committing way more code and dealing with a much larger number of user issues.

It feels like success to be able to properly support our community by improving the product, while creating a business model that we can be proud of.

Read the Docs 2017 Stats

2018-02-14T00:00:00Z

2017 was a good year for Read the Docs. We’ve settled into a sustainability model that is working for us, and have started to grow our team to be able to better support the community.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published for the past 5 years. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 are also available.

Page Views

Our stats:

338 Million Page Views (up from 252M in 2016)
75 Million Unique Visitors (up from 56M in 2016)

We remain one of the largest sites on the internet. Turns out a lot of people read documentation each day for open source projects!

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

77,000 projects (up from 53k in 2016)
103,000 users (up from 65k in 2016)

We have been battling spam quite heavily this year, so these numbers might be a bit skewed. I believe they should be pretty accurate in terms of percentage growth though.

Community

This year, we had:

23 people who committed code to the main repository (up from 18 in 2016)
1058 commits (similar to 1032 in 2016)
513 issues - 194 open, 319 closed (up from 461 in 2016)

Funding

$250,000 in revenue (up from $75,000 in 2016)

We now have four full-time people working on the project. This has made it feel like we’re able to move forward, instead of simply fighting to stay in the same place.

Our largest initiative this year has been our Ethical Advertising initiative. It has been going quite well, and is the primary driver of our ability to hire a team to work on things.

Our other two funding sources are readthedocs.com & donations. Both are bringing in appreciable amounts of money, but the advertising is at around 5x the combined value of our other revenue sources.

Our hosting costs continue to be sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them. We’re looking at moving hosting providers in 2018, because Rackspace is winding down their support for OSS hosting.

Conclusion

We have decided to invest in building a sustainable business instead of trying to work only on volunteer effort. This has allowed us to focus on things we can control, build a small team, and help improve the product for all of our users.

We look forward to continuing to grow into 2018!

Read the Docs 2016 Stats

2017-01-13T00:00:00Z

Congrats, you made it through 2016! Read the Docs has been rolling along, and we’ve had another interesting year as well.

For a quick summary:

Our level of contributions and commits has gone down a good bit this year.
Our traffic and user growth has been quite steady, which is particularly impressive at the scale we’re operating at.
Our efforts at funding the project have also started to bear fruit, and 2017 is looking to be the year that Read the Docs will become a sustainable project.

We will go into more detail below about each of these details.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013, 2014, and 2015 are also available.

Page Views

Our stats:

252 Million Page Views (+48%)
56 Million Unique Visitors (+47%)

Page view growth has been steady again this year. This is particularly impressive given the scale that we’re operating at. We’re quite happy to see folks using Read the Docs more and more, as well as seeing many other projects using our theme or other concepts that we’ve pioneered in the general software ecosystem.

We remain one of the largest sites on the internet.

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

53673 projects (+91%)
64585 users (+65%)

Read the Docs has some high profile projects that push a lot of traffic. There are however thousands of smaller libraries and projects that fill out that full range of documentation that we host.

We are happy to host documentation for all open source projects, and are glad the community finds the service useful.

Community

This year, we had:

18 people who committed code (-50% from last year)
1032 commits (-46%)
461 issues - 236 open, 225 closed (-42%)

Our community activity is much lower this year, which is a multi-year trend that we’ve been seeing. This is in part due to the maturity of the project and code base, but also because we’ve struggled to attract and retain new contributors. The code base and project are reasonably hard to set up, and we haven’t had enough time and focus on onboarding contributors into the project.

Additionally, as a hosted service, the majority of issues we receive are support requests. These issues don’t necessarily lend to user contributions, and are generally low priority for us as we don’t have any additional time to volunteer to resolving them.

It’s been our plan to address this support gap for a while. Starting this year, we plan to create a part-time role, dedicated to handling support. Ideally, we would promote someone from our community for this role, however this pool doesn’t exist at the moment.

As maintainers, we are discouraged by the continued lack of interest in contributing to our project, but fully realize that we also have a role in this. We can reduce complexity and make our projects more approachable. We can also be more vocal about where and how you can start to contribute. In the past, we assumed users would come to us with interest in contributing, however we’ve also received feedback that it’s not apparent we require the help. If you’re interested in contributing, never hesitate to ask where you can contribute. We’re happy to have contributions of any size.

We certainly aren’t the only project that has trouble attracting contributions, there is a plethora of examples in the open source ecosystem of this problem. It would be great if projects could rely strictly on volunteers for maintenance, however there are economics of this problem that we can solve by ourselves.

Funding

Our hosting costs continue to be sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them.

Our largest initiative this year has been our attempt at building Ethical Advertising into our site. The project has been well received, which we have been grateful for. Funding is a fundamental part of sustainability, and we’re glad people are supportive of our efforts to get there.

The best outcome of our sustainability efforts is that we’re going to be able to hire someone part time to handle support for our users. Support has always been an area that we have not done our best work, nor have we had enough time to handle it well. We’re excited to give support and community development more consistent attention, and hope that it leads to a better experience for users and perhaps even more contributions.

Our other efforts at sustainability are also progressing. Our commercial hosting service is starting to slowly build revenue from users who want private documentation. We hope to continue to build that into another source of revenue, which can help support development of the code base.

Conclusion

2016 has been another year of mixed results.

We are continuing to see more users and folks who are reading documentation on our platform. We think the software industry is caring more and more about documentation by the year, and we’re helping to play a role.

The downside is that as a community project, we still continue to have trouble attracting contributions, especially repeat contributions. We hope that with some of the changes we make this year this won’t continue to be the case.

Either way, thanks to everyone that has helped us this last year! We appreciate all your support, contributions, and patience, and hope we can make 2017 the year that we can call our project sustainable.

Read the Docs 2015 Stats

2016-01-15T00:00:00Z

2015 has been another great year for Read the Docs. We’ve addressed some long-standing issues like not having Markdown support, and built a number of wonderful tools for the documentation community.

Note

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

Our posts from 2013 and 2014 are also available.

Community

This year, we had:

27 people who committed code (-41% from last year)
1931 commits (+54%)
800 issues - 630 closed, 170 open (+60%)

We have a much lower number of people who committed to the code-base this year, while increasing the number of commits and issues by over 50%. This is mainly because we worked with Gregor for three months after our fundraiser.

The lack of committers is sad though, and I hope that we can get more people involved with the project over time. It really is unsustainable at the current level of community involvement. All of our operations and user support tasks are done by vanishingly small number of volunteers, with no new growth in that group of folks.

Interested in contributing? We have documentation on contributing on the site. You can also contribute financially at our sustainability page or by buying a monthly Gold subscription.

Page Views

Our stats:

170 Million Page Views (+55%)
38 Million Unique Visitors (+58%)

Page view growth has been steady again this year. It’s great to see so many people reading documentation that we are hosting.

We remain one of the largest sites on the internet, and that doesn’t account for traffic to CNAME’s, which is another 40% of our traffic.

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

28000 projects (+85%)
39001 users (+75%)

Read the Docs has some high profile projects that push a lot of traffic. There are however thousands of smaller libraries and projects that fill out that full range of documentation that we host. We are happy to host documentation for all open source projects, and are glad the community finds the services useful.

Funding

Our hosting costs are sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them.

Development on Read the Docs is funded by the community. We launched a Sustainabilty Campaign earlier this year that funded work for 3 months. It was great to have help with our support workflow.

We are launching a new user-supported funding model this year, and we hope to be able to bring someone on to work on support in a more permanent basis.

Conclusion

2015 has been a year of mixed result. We have continued growing and serving more traffic. However, our contributor base shrank, and we haven’t been doing a good job of supporting users in the second half of the year.

We hope that with renewed funding we’ll be able to better support users in 2016.

Read the Docs 2014 Stats

2014-12-31T00:00:00Z

2014 has been another banner year for Read the Docs. The project has been steadily growing in the open source ecosystem, expanding a good deal outside of the Python community. We have built a bunch of fantastic new features, and continued improving the documentation experience for the open source world.

Note

You can always see our latest 30 days stats at http://www.seethestats.com/site/readthedocs.org.

Our post from 2013 is also available here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/read-the-docs-2013-stats/

Community

This year, we had:

46 people who committed code (+17% from last year)
1253 commits (+127%)
500 issues - 376 closed, 130 open (+84%)

We have over doubled the commit count from the previous year, along with having almost double the issues. Our contributor base has grown slowly, but not nearly at the rate of issues and user growth.

A big part of that is the addition of Anthony to the core team. He has been a great help, and done lots of good work on the project.

Page Views

Our stats:

110 Million Page Views (+70%)
24 Million Unique Visitors (+85%)

Page view growth has been steady again this year. It’s great to see so many people reading documentation that we are hosting.

With an average time of 3 minutes per page, this means users have spent nearly 600 years [1] reading documentation on Read the Docs this year. I can only imagine how much development time has been saved.

Note

I believe this makes Read the Docs the biggest documentation hosting website in the world. Pretty neat.

A picture shows more than the words do, I think. Here is our weekly graph for the year:

Site Stats

The stats, in total numbers:

15128 projects (+90%)
22263 users (+90%)
2053616 builds (+97%)

Read the Docs has some high profile projects that push a lot of traffic. There are however thousands of smaller libraries and projects that fill out that full range of documentation that we host.

Funding

Our hosting costs are sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them.

Development on Read the Docs is funded by the community on Gittip. I am very grateful for the support that the community has given the project over the years. We haven’t been promoting the sponsorship on Gittip, so the numbers there have gone down.

We are looking at more funding options in the new year, more on that soon :)

The stats:

$100/wk (-40%)
100 people giving money (-12%)

Conclusion

2014 has been an amazing year for Read the Docs. We have continued growing and serving more traffic.

We are working on a number of new features to expand the user base, and make the site more approachable. We look forward to continuing to improve the documentation ecosystem in the new year.

[1]	2min 51sec * 108,801,906 views / 525,600 minutes/year = 589.6 years

Read the Docs 2013 Stats

2013-12-23T00:00:00Z

2013 has been a big year for Read the Docs. Our mission is to make documentation hosting easier, with the overall goal of increasing the quality of documentation in the programming world. I believe that we have been doing good work towards that goal, and I want to share some numbers to reflect our progress.

Community

Our community has been great this year. I have been really happy to see a few people submit multiple patches and features. This year, we had:

39 people who committed code
550 commits
271 issues - 218 closed, 53 open

Many thanks to Wraithan in particular, who has taken on a large role in helping maintain the site and servers.

If there is anyone else out there who would like to help with operations, especially outside of US timezones, please let me know.

Page Views

Our growth in page views has always been crazy to me. It was somewhere in mid-2011 that Read the Docs went from a hobby project, into something projects depended on. This growth has never stopped, and today a large number of important projects depend on Read the Docs.

Our stats:

65 Million Page Views
13 Million Unique Visitors

For context, these numbers are similar to what MDN has.

Note

These numbers are actually a bit low. Some themes don’t support default Sphinx template blocks, so we can’t count them in our stats correctly.

I think an image shows this a bit better than words:

Site Stats

Our pageviews are driven mainly by 100 or so high traffic sites. We have a lot of small projects that are up on Read the Docs too that we love.

The stats:

7949 projects
11679 users
1040182 builds

Funding

Our hosting costs are sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them.

Development on Read the Docs is funded by the community on Gittip. I am very grateful for the support that the community has given the project over the years. It is great validation that people value the service you are providing, even when you give it away for free.

The stats:

$167/wk currently
114 people giving money

Conclusion

2013 has been a great year for Read the Docs. We have made a lot of progress, and I think 2014 will be even better.

We are working on a number of new features to expand the user base, and make the site more approachable. We forward to continuing to improve the documentation ecosystem in the new year.