Almost exactly three years ago, I posted an analysis of the traffic on ogre3d.org and the rough country breakdown of our users, which is always fascinating to me. I hadn’t actually been collecting web stats on the site for about a year (the previous set-up was lost when I had to recreate the server in a hurry, and somehow reinstating it never seemed to rise to the top of my TODO list), but a month ago I finally got around to adding Google Analytics to the site. The results have been very interesting, particularly when compared to 3 years ago, so I thought I’d share some factoids with you.
Visitors still increasing
In 2007, log analysis indicated we were getting a little over 100,000 unique visitors per month; obviously this is not 100% accurate due to shared & dynamic IP addresses, people logging in from multiple sites, etc, but it’s a reasonable order of magnitude indicator. Analytics is typically more conservative in its figures, since it excludes bots better as well as non-Javascript browsers, but still in the past month (actually only 28 days) we’ve had over 120,000 unique visitors to the site – and 1.2M page views – so we’ve sustained and slightly improved our user traffic. And all without any Slashdot posts 
Also, this doesn’t count visits to Sourceforge, BitBucket or ome static generated HTML like our online documentation pages.
The Meteoric Rise of China
In 2007, China ranked 15th in our league table of visitors. Three years on and they’ve risen to the number two spot, comfortably surpassing Germany – at first I wondered if that was down to users there using fewer proxies, but since the figures for other countries have remained fairly stable I think the majority of this is genuinely a vast increase in the number of Chinese visitors to OGRE’s site. Here’s the top 10 countries (figures are for the number of visits):
The range of countries is demonstrated by how many are in the grey ‘others’ section (38.73%). Except for the massive change in China’s share, most of the other countries have stayed approximately in their relative positions & shares of the user population since 2007.
Region View – Europe still dominates, Asia challenges the Americas
The country view is, however, quite misleading if your aim is to decide where to locate a web server for example, because it naturally biases the figures towards large unified countries (like the USA and China), and doesn’t really show a true regional picture. For that, we have to examine the numbers (again, number of visits) by continent:
Now, even though the continent view includes Russia in Europe which screws up the locality principle a bit, even if you exclude that Europe dominates our community, with close to 1 in every 2 visitors to the site being from Europe. The Americas and Asia share most of the rest almost equally now, which is a change from 2007 when the Americas were more dominant, and everyone else shares the scraps (3.5%). The Americas figure is made up of about 86% North America and 14% South America, and Asia is predominantly (60%) the Eastern Asia countries (mostly China, but South Korea holds its own too), with South-East and Southern Asia sharing the rest – particular hotspots there are India, Indonesia, Malasia, Turkey and Vietnam.
City Clusters
One thing I like about Analytics is the ability to drill down into countries and look at the local clustering. There are the expected clusters around cities – in the USA, the top 2 cities are unsurprisingly New York and Los Angeles, although Columbus OH takes the number 3 spot, and in the UK the clustering around London is massive – but they typically represent only about 25-30% of the audience, with the rest being scattered pretty much uniformly across most areas of the country in question. It’s fun to be able to point at almost anywhere in Europe, North America and the southern and eastern parts of Asia and to have a pretty good chance of being quite near to someone who has used the OGRE site.
The Monday morning OGRE fix
With OGRE obviously used by a lot of people in their spare time, you might expect that the weekends would be the busiest times for the site, but the opposite is in fact true – Mondays are consistently the busiest days (particularly 6-9am PST), with Saturday being the least busy. Whether this is because people are working with OGRE, or just cheekily surfing in their work time rather than face the Monday workload, is hard to verify!
Final Thought
I get a kick out of looking at these stats so I hope you find them interesting too. It’s really cool to think that there are only a very small number of countries (such as North Korea and Laos) from which we don’t get any (non-proxy) visitors from in a typical month, and it’s very interesting to see how the visitor base is gradually spreading out and diversifying, something which I’m sure every site witnesses but it’s interesting to see it in your own data. The question is – will China keep the current trajectory? At this rate, they’ll take the number one spot from the USA in only a few more years and put Asia second in the regional rankings!
April 8th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
OMG China train is coming
. Interessting, yet not surpising, to see them gaining that much importance.
I was also surprised about that (in my eyes) small amount of Americans here. But it’s nice to know that Ogre is still growing, as you can see from the visitors in total.
April 8th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Im a cheeky Monday morning peeker.
April 9th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
” will China keep the current trajectory? At this rate, they’ll take the number one spot from the USA in only a few more years and put Asia second in the regional rankings!”
Yes, i think so… as i know that there are more and more teams and companies developing games and softwares with OGRE3D in Chinese these years…
It’s so interesting…
Thanks very much…
Maybe you have guessed that I also came from China…
Yes, I come from South of China… ^_^
April 9th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
@spacegaier – there’s not a ‘small amount’ of Americans, they’re still by far the largest single country group, but it’s important to recognise that on a global scale when you combine the other countries together as regions, they’re not the majority. This is of course true on any level – raw population, even GDP figures – it’s just that as a single bloc the USA is the largest in the world, which is why it is often wrongly assumed to be the most significant (not least by its own citizens
). Barring China everywhere else is far more fragmented so individually they’re less significant, but on the whole are much larger. The European population as a whole now outnumbers the USA for example, but it’s fragmented into many countries which can often mask its size.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Yeah, these days the EU comes to about 500 million while the US is still at 300 million.
The reason the US is still considered the market to be in is because despite having “only” 300 million people , the GDP is more less at the same level as the whole EU while at the same time being less fragmented and generally easier to do business at ( mostly because of unified distributions channels , common language etc )
April 9th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Yeah – per capita GDP is still higher in the US (totals were about $16 trillion in the EU and $14 trillion in the US despite population differences) , although there’s not a vast difference when you’re looking at the already developed EU zones – where I live we’re on par with the US and Norway actually exceeds it, while mainland UK, France and Germany are a little lower. Crucially though there’s a *lot* of growth potential in Europe because large areas of eastern europe are still underdeveloped – that’son hold now following great financial collapse of course, but it will re-start again. Although the US is great as a huge unified existing market, it’s not likely to be a big source of growth for people who are already in it. For that you’ll have to look to eastern europe and asia in future years where large numbers of new consumers are coming from. Things are definitely spreading out away from the traditional centres, and that’s a good thing.
April 9th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Eastern Asia is definitely on their way up – although at this point China is making waves simply by virtue of sheer numbers – ultimately they will have to bring their per capita GDP to much , much higher levels to be able to match the US in terms of consumer spending.
With the way things are going over there , Europe is actually more stagnant than the US and this has nothing to do with politics – actually it is much worse than that and it is related to demographics which are on completely unsustainable track in both western and eastern Europe – simply put , these societies are slowly dying out.
Regardless of its merits, you just can’t maintain a society based on implicit transfer of wealth from younger to older generations with below-replacement-level birthrates.
There is just no way around it – it’s a matter of simple mathematics ( well, I guess there is a way around it and it is thru immigration but that’s another story)
April 9th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
This is true, but it’s not just an EU problem, it’s common to all developed nations, ie those that have a decent life expectancy. The US has exactly the same problem (although average life expectancy in the US is a bit lower than the EU – handy!
), it’s just that the US enjoys a higher than average immigration rate of the young which helps mask it. It’s still very much there though.
The only sustainable answer is that everyone has to work longer. Retiring at 65 is already gone here (it’s rising to 67 at least), I fully expect it to be 70+ by the time I get there.
April 9th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
What about sweden?
April 9th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Sweden is 14th, just below Australia and just above Brazil.
April 13th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
I’d be interested to see what browsers and Operating systems hit the site most.
April 13th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
[...] to post the OS & browser stats for the OGRE site, which I didn’t include in my previous demographics post, so here we [...]