Welcome to the yearly recap of Blender’s numbers. Some of the figures in this article were presented as part of the Blender Annual Report 2020, and some are brand new. Overall, the growing trend for the Blender project continues
The blender.org Website
More popular than ever, the blender.org website and several of its subdomains have received a combined 23M unique visitors. That is a 35% increase from last year, approaching 2M visitors per month.
The most viewed pages on blender.org are the download page followed by the “Thank You” page, displayed after a download started, the homepage and the features page. Buildbot (available on builder.blender.org) is also very popular.
Half of the website traffic comes from 8 countries: USA, India, UK, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Japan, China (up 71%).
Blender Downloads Count
In 2020 Blender has been downloaded over 14M times from blender.org. With 4 major releases during the year, this is an average of 3.5M downloads per release. This is a significant increase across all operating systems.
In addition to blender.org, Blender is available on other platforms such as the Microsoft Store, Steam and Snapcraft. Microsoft Store and Snapcraft provide information on the amount of installed Blender releases, which has slightly increased during 2020.
Steam uses a different metric: concurrent users. How many people are using Blender right now on Steam? Close to 3000, which is over twice as many as last year.
At the beginning of 2020, Blender Foundation announced the LTS project, with Blender 2.83 as a pilot release. Over the course of the year, this release has been updated 10 times, and will keep getting updates during 2021. Since it’s targeted at a specific audience, the LTS release has significantly less installs, mostly through distribution platforms such as Microsoft Store, Snapcraft and Steam.
Development Fund
The Blender Development Fund has grown, with more donations across most individual memberships. On the Corporate side, the growth was significant, especially thanks to 3 new Patron level memberships.
When looking at individual memberships, it’s worth to point out that while traffic on blender.org and downloads have increased over 30%, Development Fund donations are up 10%.
Code Contributions
On the software side, Blender has seen an unprecedented number of 108 new contributors. This is a testament to how welcoming the Blender project is and also of how challenging 2020 was in terms of growth.
Issues Response and Resolution
The response and resolution time chart presented in the previous report turned some heads in the industry and was very well received.
The public and freely accessible developer.blender.org portal shows one of the most impressive aspects of the Blender community. In 2020, with a significantly increased amount of downloads and traffic, did the Blender triaging and development team manage to keep the same response time? It seems so. The number of issues reported is comparable to 2019, as well as the response and resolution timings.
Other platforms and portals
Portals such as Blender ID, Open Data and DevTalk have not seen significant technical updates during 2020, but nevertheless each of them has seen a steady growth in traffic and user count. In order to better expose these numbers, as well as all the other figures presented in this report, the idea of creating a dedicated metrics portal is being explored.
Conclusions
Overall this was another outstanding year for Blender. The project and its community are growing strong and healthy.
Special thanks to Michael Newbon and Dalai Felinto for helping with the charts design and data collection and analysis.
Francesco Siddi
Amsterdam, 2021