.. post:: Feb 14, 2018 :tags: stats, year-in-review
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.
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!
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.
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)
- $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.
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!