Hello all!

I built a site that keeps track of the submissions on e621 and other furry art sites, and generates graphs and statistics every day. You can see it at https://furbitron.com .

Before I built it, I thought the most interesting thing would be the "all sites - all time" graph (for the big comparison), plus the "all sites but FA - all time" graph (so the smaller sites aren't "lost" at the bottom of the all-sites graph). Now I think the year-on-year graphs for the various sites might be the most interesting.

I know that https://e621.net/stats exists, and Furbitron cannot easily replace it. Most other sites don't provide much in the way of stats, though, so Furbitron can be helpful to make comparisons between sites.

The "live" data for e621 comes from the API once a day, using a program that (as far as I can tell) complies with the API requirements. The historical data came from a one-time download of the database dump that e621 provides.

For other sites, the "live" data comes from that site's API (if available) or by grabbing the "new submissions" page and parsing the HTML (if no API), once a day. The historical data came from asking the site for either a series of submission numbers or dates, depending on the site's capabilities.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com

This is pretty neat. I love statistics like this

All i know is that explains why it's near impossible to hunt down early FA art to archive. (hard limit on search depth on the website)

Shows the absurd increase in activity since I joined quite clearly.

topic #22373

thehuskyk9 said:
This is pretty neat.

Thanks!

supracat said:
All i know is that explains why it's near impossible to hunt down early FA art to archive. (hard limit on search depth on the website)

It wasn't for Furbitron, but I've been able to find some early submissions on FA before - like, four- and five-digit submission numbers - using their regular search. Then again, I was searching for some fairly rare keywords. I haven't tried to search something like "dragon" and page all the way through the results.

Furiffic does have a limit like that - because of the way their URLs work (artist first), you have to go through their "browse" page to find older submissions. The site makes it look like you can page forever, but at 48 images per page, it only works up to page 208; trying to go to 209 gives you an error. Page 209 would take you over 10,000 submissions, so I think that's the limit they use.

lance_armstrong said:
Shows the absurd increase in activity since I joined quite clearly.

So you're posting all this stuff? <_<

furbitron said:
So you're posting all this stuff? <_<

Haha no I mean how there's about 7 times the uploads per day in 2021 than there were in 2011.

Used to be you could just check in, look at the latest 200 posts, and you had seen a day's worth of activity. Now it's almost 1500 posts every day.

I love me some statistics. Interesting that e6 gets 10% the posts per day of furaffinity.

For looking at growth rate, it'd be interesting to see the log of post rate versus total posts. In that case, exponential growth makes a straight, increasing line. Here's one example of that.

Does your data let you see the weekdays or times of posting activity?

I was literally just considering if I should try posting on... well, any of the sites below e621. Looks like I should stick with the top two.

Lance Armstrong pointed out that my stats had a mistake; for the week, month, and year measurement periods, I was adding up one day too few of data, but dividing by the full number of days, so some of my numbers were too low. This has been revised and updated numbers will appear about 45 minutes from now.

I also fixed the time parsing for FurAffinity. Apparently their human-readable times use a fixed offset from GMT and don't change with daylight savings time.

splineclaw said:
I love me some statistics.

Thanks!

For looking at growth rate, it'd be interesting to see the log of post rate versus total posts. In that case, exponential growth makes a straight, increasing line.

I know it's not quite the same thing, but I made one-off graphs of the submission IDs (log) vs time (linear), for the all-time data set. I turned off the legends on the multi-site graphs because they covered up the data; refer to the "regular" non-log graphs for the legend.

https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-all-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-allbutfa-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-fa-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-furiffic-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-furrynetwork-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-sofurry-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-weasyl-all.png
https://furbitron.com/experiments/01/graph-e621-all.png

Does your data let you see the weekdays or times of posting activity?

I only check each site once every 24 hours. The check happens at midnight-ish from a North American perspective, so I could kind of separate weekends from weekdays if I wanted.

Since I only check once a day, I can't easily see which hours of the day are more popular for posting. For FurAffinity and e621, the post I see will always be from less than a minute ago; on Furiffic, it might be from half an hour ago.

e621 publishes a dump of the database daily - no images, just all the tags and metadata. If you can pay the freight (660+ MB download), you can analyze the post times in there. You have to use something other than Excel to see all of it at once, though. :)

Doing a little perl/awk/sort on the copy of the e621 database I have from mid-October, 2021, there is definitely a diurnal pattern to it. This is the post count vs hour-of-day in GMT.

.
 166233 00
 151775 01
 145247 02
 139794 03
 135957 04
 123589 05
 110506 06
 101269 07
  89257 08
  80624 09
  81874 10
  83215 11
  85508 12
  93267 13
 103610 14
 115114 15
 121455 16
 132357 17
 139115 18
 142753 19
 149315 20
 155909 21
 159061 22
 156590 23

Subtracting 6 from the hour-of-day to get an approximation of US time, the least popular time is roughly 2 to 7 AM, and the most popular is roughly 3 to 7 PM.

To get more detailed data from other sites, I'd have to hit them more often, which I have not done; I'm trying not to get banned. A couple of years ago, for another project, I had a script that checked FurAffinity's front page every 5 minutes. It ran for about 800 hits or 2.8 days before Cloudflare told me to go away. :D

Edit, 2022-10-10: Changed URLs for log graphs.

This is a year-end review of how the sites Furbitron monitors fared in 2021, and how that compares to past years.

tl;dr: 2021 was the first year ever where FurAffinity did not have year-on-year growth. 2021 was the best year ever for e621. For the other sites Furbitron monitors, their best years were around 5 to 7 years ago.

tl;dr but as a table:

site		submission IDs in 2021
FurAffinity 	5,358,000
e621	 	  546,000
SoFurry		  134,100
Weasyl		  109,100
FurryNetwork	   40,700
Furiffic	   19,500

(submission ID counts are rounded)

Furbitron itself

Work started on Furbitron back in late April, but then a bunch of real life happened. Work resumed in earnest in late September, and continued apace through the public launch on November 22.

Since then, there have been bug fixes both large and small, and a little work for the year-end rollover. There have been visitors from all over the world; some of them are even humans!

FurAffinity

2021 was the first year ever where FurAffinity did not have year-on-year growth; it ended 2021 with about 5,358,000 submission IDs, as compared to 5,499,000 for 2020. It was a close race - through about mid-August, 2021 was still leading 2020 - but the 2021 rate slowed down slightly from then on.

Before 2021, FurAffinity had year-on-year growth every year from 2005 to 2020. It launched in late 2005 and had about 12,000 submission IDs that year; 2006 was the first full year of operation, with about 320,600 submission IDs.

FurAffinity experienced a large jump in submission IDs in 2020 and 2021, compared to the previous few years - there were about 4.0 million submission IDs in 2018, 4.5 million in 2019, 5.5 million in 2020, and 5.4 million in 2021. It will be interesting to see if 2022 also reaches 5+ million submissions.

Furiffic

Furiffic had about 19,500 submission IDs in 2021. This was an improvement over 2020 (16,800) and 2019 (about 16,600 through late November), but lower than the years before that.

Furiffic's best year ever was 2016, with about 51,600 submission IDs. It launched in spring 2013 and had about 2,100 submission IDs that year; 2014 was the first full year of operation, with about 3,900 submission IDs through late November.

(Because of the way Furiffic's history browsing works, it is not always easy for Furbitron to find submissions that were made on or near December 31 of each year. This is why some of the lines on the year-on-year graph do not extend all the way through December.)

FurryNetwork

FurryNetwork had about 40,700 submission IDs in 2021. This continued the decline from 2020 (52,500) and 2019 (83,900).

FurryNetwork's best year ever was 2016, with about 1,063,000 submission IDs. It launched in summer 2015 and had about 286,800 submission IDs that year. 2021 was the slowest full year for FurryNetwork.

SoFurry

SoFurry had about 134,100 submission IDs in 2021. This was lower than 2020 (139,300), but better than 2019 (126,800).

SoFurry's best year ever was 2017, with about 166,700 submission IDs. It launched in spring 2006 and had about 6,700 submission IDs that year; 2007 was the first full year of operation, with about 23,900 submission IDs.

Weasyl

Weasyl had about 109,100 submission IDs in 2021. This continued the decline from 2020 (121,100) and 2019 (134,900).

Weasyl's best year ever was 2014, with about 526,000 submission IDs. It launched in fall 2011 and had about 40 submission IDs that year; 2012 was the first full year of operation, with about 77,200 submission IDs. 2021 was the slowest full year for Weasyl since 2012.

e621

2021 was the best year ever for e621, with about 546,000 submission IDs.

e621 also experienced a large jump in submission IDs in 2020 and 2021, compared to the previous few years - there were about 338,000 submission IDs in 2018, 350,000 in 2019, 451,000 in 2020, and 546,000 in 2021.

e621 had year-on-year growth every year from 2008 to 2021. It launched in spring 2007 and had about 14,100 submission IDs that year; 2008 was the first full year of operation, with about 10,700 submission IDs.

Notes and disclaimers

The submission ID counts in this post have been rounded off. They should be accurate to within 1% or so.

The owners of the various sites can directly query their site's database, so they may publish slightly different numbers than are found here.

The numbers here come from Furbitron's monitoring of the sites listed. The historical data was mostly gathered from the sites in September 2021. e621 provides a dump of their site database, so the historical data for e621 came from that dump in September 2021. Since then, Furbitron has done "live" monitoring of each site, once a day.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

I for one, believe that this thread even deserves to be a "sticky".

It is a good reminder of the importance of E6 (i.e. very important), but also remind us that the Furry ambiance in the Internet is not just one site, with one style. There is diversity on that.

This is a mid-year review of how the sites Furbitron monitors are projected to fare for all of 2022, and how that compares to 2021.

tl;dr:

2022 may be the second year in a row where FurAffinity will not have year-on-year growth. 2022 will probably be the best year ever for e621.

FurAffinity submission ID 50,000,000 will probably happen around November 26, 2022 - possibly a little earlier.

tl;dr, but as a table:

Site          Estimate  vs 2021  Notes
Buzzly          222,000 +257%    based on submission rate since 2022-03-19
FurAffinity   5,200,000   -2.9%
Furiffic         17,600   -9.7%  if Furiffic had stayed online all year
FurryNetwork     39,300   -3.4%
SoFurry         136,000   +1.4%
Weasyl          104,000   -4.7%
e621            646,000  +18%

(submission estimates are rounded)

Buzzly

Buzzly is projected to have about 222,000 submissions in 2022, based on the post rate since March 19, 2022. Buzzly had about 62,200 posts in 2021; the 2022 estimate would be 257% higher than the 2021 count.

Buzzly launched in late 2021, and experienced fast growth through early 2022. Furbitron added tracking of Buzzly in early February 2022.

Around February and March 2022, there were some communications from Buzzly staff, and changes in their acceptable upload policy, that did not find favor with many of their users.

As a result, the post rate at Buzzly dropped off a lot in mid-March 2022. March 16, 2022 was the last day where Buzzly got more than 1,000 new posts a day - before that point, it averaged about 2,510 posts a day. Starting on March 21, 2022, Buzzly has never had more than 200 new posts a day - the average since then is about 93 posts a day.

If the post rate at Buzzly had remained at the level of January 1 to March 18, 2022, Buzzly would have had about 1,020,000 submissions in 2022, or about 1,550% higher than the 2021 count.

FurAffinity

FurAffinity is projected to have about 5,200,000 submissions in 2022. This would be 2.9% lower than the 5,358,000 submissions in 2021, and would mark the second year ever where FA would not have year-on-year growth.

Going strictly by the numbers, FurAffinity will probably reach submission ID 50,000,000 around November 26 or 27, 2022.

In reality, it will probably happen a few days sooner than that - as the submission IDs increase, more people will post submissions, hoping to have the 50,000,000th submission. Also, the projected date is on the Thanksgiving holiday long weekend in the United States, which may allow artists to have more time to post new submissions.

Furiffic

Furiffic announced in March 2022 that they would shut down on June 1, 2022, and they did. This estimate is based on linear extrapolation to 2022-12-31, based on data from 2022-01-01 to 2022-06-01.

Furiffic is projected to have had about 17,600 submissions in 2022, if it had stayed online all year. This would have been 9.7% lower than the 19,500 submission IDs in 2021.

FurryNetwork

FurryNetwork is projected to have about 39,300 submission IDs in 2022. This would be 3.4% lower than the 40,700 submission IDs in 2021.

SoFurry

SoFurry is projected to have about 136,000 submission IDs in 2022. This would be 1.4% higher than the 134,100 submissions in 2021.

Weasyl

Weasyl is projected to have about 104,000 submission IDs in 2022. This would be 4.7% lower than the 109,100 submission IDs in 2021.

e621

e621 is projected to have about 646,000 submission IDs in 2022. This is 18% higher than the 546,000 submission IDs in 2021, and would continue e621's history of year-on-year submission ID growth since 2009.

Notes and disclaimers

These are linear extrapolations to 2022-12-31, based on data from 2022-01-01 to 2022-07-07, for all sites except Buzzly and Furiffic.

The differences for Buzzly and Furiffic are in the site-specific sections above.

The submission ID counts in this post have been rounded off. They should be accurate to within 1% or so.

The owners of the various sites can directly query their site's database, so they may publish slightly different numbers than are found here.

The numbers here come from Furbitron's monitoring of the sites listed. The historical data was mostly gathered from the sites in September 2021. e621 provides a dump of their site database, so the historical data for e621 came from that dump in September 2021. Since then, Furbitron has done "live" monitoring of each site, once a day.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

FurAffinity is approaching its 50 millionth submission! Plus other new features on Furbitron.

tl;dr: FA will probably get its 50 millionth submission around 2022-11-27. Furbitron now provides projected dates for future submission milestones for all supported and current sites.

FurAffinity

FurAffinity will probably hit submission ID 50,000,000 around 2022-11-27 - a little over a week from now.

In the update above from July 2022, which used a different curve fit, the predicted date was very similar - November 26 or 27. Since then, the date according to a linear projection has wandered around in the last third of November, from as early as 2022-11-21, to as late as 2022-11-28. The earlier predictions were made in August and early September. FurAffinity's post rate dropped off a little starting around mid-September, so the predictions since then have moved later.

Note that this doesn't mean that FurAffinity actually has 50,000,000 images, stories, songs, or photos on it! Many of the submission numbers are no longer used, for a variety of reasons - they were old ads or streaming notifications that the artist has since deleted, or they were submissions that an artist deleted when they left FA, or they were submissions removed by an admin for breaking their site rules.

FurAffinity doesn't publish their idea of how many submissions they currently have. Other sites do, or did, giving a range of around 61% (Furiffic, RIP) to 85% (e621) of the submission IDs corresponding to live submissions. If FurAffinity is also in that range, that means it has roughly 30,500,000 to 42,500,000 submissions right now.

Projections for other sites

Furbitron added predictions of the dates of future submission IDs back in August 2022. The predictions are available on the statistics page for each site, as well as on the all-sites and all-sites-but-FA pages.

They are computed daily, using a linear projection, and are based on the past year of data for each site. The milestones are manually selected.

The predictions for Buzzly will be somewhat optimistic until about mid-March 2023. The past year of data includes the time of very rapid growth at Buzzly in late 2021 and early 2022, but their growth rate has been lower since mid-March 2022. Because of this, Buzzly is not included in the table below.

Since Furiffic shut down earlier this year, it is also not included in the table below.

Here are the predictions as of 2022-11-19, sorted by date:

Site          ID          Projected date
------------  ----------  --------------
FurAffinity   50,000,000  2022-11-27
e621           4,000,000  2023-05-02
SoFurry        2,000,000  2023-06-14
Weasyl         2,400,000  2024-11-27
FurryNetwork   2,000,000  2028-01-01

Experiments

Furbitron now has an experiments page , for special projects based on Furbitron's data. Most of the experiments will not automatically update like the rest of Furbitron. There are two experiments currently available, and one more coming soon.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

This is a year-end review of how the sites Furbitron monitors fared in 2022, and how that compares to past years.

tl;dr: 2022 was the second year ever where FurAffinity did not have year-on-year growth. 2022 was the best year ever for e621. Some of the smaller sites enjoyed a "Twitter bump" in their post rates around mid-November.

tl;dr but as a table:

Submission IDs
site               2022       2021  change     notes
Buzzly          215,000     62,000  +250%
FurAffinity   5,140,000  5,358,000    -4.1%
e621            684,600    546,000   +25%
SoFurry         136,600    134,100    +1.9%
Weasyl          109,000    109,100    -0.092%
FurryNetwork     44,000     40,700    +8.1%
Furiffic          7,400                        shut down on June 1, 2022
e6AI                860                        new for 2022

(submission ID counts are rounded)

The "Twitter bump"

As you may have heard, Twitter got a new owner in late October, 2022. Shortly after that, Twitter laid off many of its employees, began changing some of the features of their service, and reinstated some users they had previously suspended.

Because of those changes, some Twitter users expressed concern as to whether or not Twitter would remain online, and some of them stopped using Twitter.

At least some artists seem to have increased their usage of furry art sites in response. This is easiest to see on the past-year graphs for the lower-volume sites that Furbitron monitors; look for a slight increase in the post rate starting around mid-November, 2022:

Buzzly, past year

FurryNetwork, past year

SoFurry, past year

Weasyl, past year

This table gives a comparison of Furbitron's count of the number of submissions in the past week, from November 1 and December 1, 2022. In other words, it counts submissions from October 26-November 1 and November 25-December 1.

Submissions for week ended

site          Nov 1  Dec 1  change   
Buzzly          398    558  +40%   
FurryNetwork    798   1144  +43%   
SoFurry        2830   2822   -0.28%   
Weasyl         2103   2763  +31%   

It is possible that not all of this bump is attributable to changes at Twitter. FurAffinity started paywalling large image uploads on about November 26, 2022, so it's possible that some artists responded by increasing their participation on other sites.

The bump visible on the graphs starts around November 10 to 15 or so. This is far enough before the change at FurAffinity that it probably can't all be attributed to the pricing change at FA.

Furbitron itself

Furbitron added support for Buzzly in February, and some support for e6AI in December. Furbitron also stopped collecting data on Furiffic when it shut down in June. There are more details in the sections for each of those sites below.

In August, Furbitron added predictions for the dates of future submission ID milestones to the statistics page for each site. The predictions are computed daily, using a linear projection, and are based on the past year of data for each site.

Furbitron added the "experiments" section in October, for special projects based on Furbitron's data. Most of the experiments will not automatically update like the rest of Furbitron.

Buzzly

Buzzly had about 215,000 submissions in 2022, which was its first full year of operation. Buzzly launched in 2021 and had about 62,000 submissions that year, most of which came in November and December.

The fast growth continued in early 2022, but around February and March, there were some communications from Buzzly staff, and changes in their acceptable upload policy, that did not find favor with many of their users.

As a result, the post rate at Buzzly dropped off a lot in mid-March 2022. March 16, 2022 was the last day where Buzzly got more than 1,000 new posts a day - before that point, it averaged about 2,510 posts a day. Starting on March 21, 2022, Buzzly has never had more than 200 new posts a day - the average since then is about 69 posts a day.

In early July, Furbitron predicted that Buzzly would have about 222,000 submissions in all of 2022; the actual results were a little less than the prediction. This prediction was manually calculated, using the lower post rate since mid-March.

Furbitron's automated predictions for Buzzly will remain optimistic until around mid-March 2023 - about a month from now. Those predictions always use the past year of data, which currently includes the last month or so of the high post rate period at Buzzly.

Furbitron added tracking of Buzzly in early February 2022. Shout out to Deer-Spangle , who provided valuable insight into Buzzly's GraphQL API. This made Buzzly support happen much more quickly than it otherwise would have.

Buzzly does not use numeric submission IDs, so Furbitron cannot check the latest submissions to get the highest submission ID. Instead, Furbitron queries Buzzly's API to get the count of submissions Buzzly claims to have had since Furbitron's last query, and adds that count to a running total.

FurAffinity

2022 was the second year ever where FurAffinity did not have year-on-year growth; it ended 2022 with about 5,140,000 submission IDs, as compared to 5,358,000 for 2021. 2022 was close behind 2021 until about mid-September, but the 2022 rate slowed down somewhat from then on.

In early July, Furbitron predicted that FurAffinity would have about 5,200,000 submission IDs in all of 2022; the actual results were a little less than the prediction.

FurAffinity reached submission ID 50,000,000 on November 27, 2022. In early July, Furbitron predicted a date of November 26 for that submission ID.

FurAffinity launched in late 2005 and had about 12,000 submission IDs that year; 2006 was the first full year of operation, with about 320,600 submission IDs. It had year-on-year growth every year from 2005 to 2020.

FurAffinity experienced a large jump in submission IDs in 2020, 2021, and 2022, compared to the previous few years - there were about 4.0 million submission IDs in 2018, 4.5 million in 2019, 5.5 million in 2020, 5.4 million in 2021, and 5.1 million in 2022. It will be interesting to see if 2023 also reaches 5+ million submissions.

Furiffic

Furiffic had about 7,400 submission IDs in 2022. Furiffic announced in March 2022 that they would shut down on June 1, 2022, and they did.

Furbitron stopped collecting data and updating the statistics for Furiffic at that time, but still displays the data collected and the statistics calculated up to that point.

In early July, Furbitron predicted that Furiffic would have had about 17,600 submissions in 2022, if it had stayed online all year.

Furiffic's best year ever was 2016, with about 51,600 submission IDs. It launched in spring 2013 and had about 2,100 submission IDs that year; 2014 was the first full year of operation, with about 3,900 submission IDs through late November.

(Because of the way Furiffic's history browsing worked, it was not always easy for Furbitron to find submissions that were made on or near December 31 of each year. This is why some of the lines on the year-on-year graph do not extend all the way through December.)

FurryNetwork

FurryNetwork had about 44,000 submission IDs in 2022. This was an improvement over 2021 (40,700), but a decline from 2020 (52,500).

In early July, Furbitron predicted that FurryNetwork would have about 39,300 submission IDs in all of 2022; the actual results were somewhat better than the prediction.

FurryNetwork's best year ever was 2016, with about 1,063,000 submission IDs. It launched in summer 2015 and had about 286,800 submission IDs that year. 2021 was the slowest full year for FurryNetwork.

SoFurry

SoFurry had about 136,600 submission IDs in 2022. This was better than 2021 (134,100), but lower than 2020 (139,300).

In early July, Furbitron predicted that SoFurry would have about 136,000 submission IDs in all of 2022; the actual results were slightly better than the prediction.

SoFurry's best year ever was 2017, with about 166,700 submission IDs. It launched in spring 2006 and had about 6,700 submission IDs that year; 2007 was the first full year of operation, with about 23,900 submission IDs.

SoFurry is developing a new version of their site, which they call SoFurry Next. A SoFurry administrator has confirmed that SoFurry Next will not use numeric submission IDs, but will have an API available.

SoFurry has not yet announced when SoFurry Next will go into production. When that happens, Furbitron's data collection for SoFurry will most likely be interrupted for at least a few days, until it is updated to handle the new site and its API.

Weasyl

Weasyl had about 109,000 submission IDs in 2022. This was a very tiny decline from 2021 (109,100), and a decline from 2020 (121,100).

In early July, Furbitron predicted that Weasyl would have about 104,000 submission IDs in all of 2022; the actual results were better than the prediction.

Weasyl's best year ever was 2014, with about 526,000 submission IDs. It launched in fall 2011 and had about 40 submission IDs that year; 2012 was the first full year of operation, with about 77,200 submission IDs. 2022 was the slowest full year for Weasyl since 2012.

e621

2022 was the best year ever for e621, with about 684,600 submission IDs.

e621 also experienced a large jump in submission IDs in 2020, 2021, and 2022, compared to the previous few years - there were about 338,000 submission IDs in 2018, 350,000 in 2019, 451,000 in 2020, 546,000 in 2021, and 684,600 in 2022.

In early July, Furbitron predicted that e621 would have about 646,000 submission IDs in all of 2022; the actual results were much better than the prediction.

e621 had year-on-year growth every year from 2008 to 2022. It launched in spring 2007 and had about 14,100 submission IDs that year; 2008 was the first full year of operation, with about 10,700 submission IDs.

e6AI

e6AI had about 860 submission IDs in 2022, the first year it was online.

e6AI went online around mid-October 2022. Furbitron first discovered it when someone asked about it on the e621 forums in early December. An e621 admin confirmed that e6AI is owned and operated by the same company as e621, and that some of the e621 staff helped set up e6AI.

Furbitron added monitoring of e6AI on December 8, 2022. Since it uses the same software as e621, it was easy to re-use the code developed to query e621's API.

Furbitron does not yet fully support e6AI. You can see statistics for e6AI on the All > Statistics and All except FA > Statistics pages, but the individual pages for each graph don't exist yet. Full support is planned for later in 2023.

Notes and disclaimers

The submission ID counts in this post have been rounded off. They should be accurate to within 1% or so.

The owners of the various sites can directly query their site's database, so they may publish slightly different numbers than are found here.

The numbers here come from Furbitron's monitoring of the sites listed. The historical data was mostly gathered from the sites in September 2021. e621 provides a dump of their site database, so the historical data for e621 came from that dump in September 2021. Since then, Furbitron has done "live" monitoring of each site, once a day.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

Edited to fix link

This is a mid-year review of how the sites Furbitron monitors are projected to fare for all of 2023, and how that compares to 2022.

tl;dr:

2023 may be the third year in a row where FurAffinity will not have year-on-year growth. 2023 will probably be the best year ever for e621. Some of the smaller sites enjoyed an "FA bump" in their post rates towards the end of May.

FurAffinity submission ID 55,000,000 will probably happen around December 20, 2023 - possibly a little earlier.

tl;dr, but as a table:

Site          Estimate   vs 2022
Buzzly           18,400  -91%
FurAffinity   4,620,000  -10%
FurryNetwork     52,000  +18%
SoFurry         142,000   +4.0%
Weasyl          135,000  +24%
e621            725,000  +18%

(submission estimates are rounded)

The "FA bump"

FA revised their acceptable upload policy on May 19, 2023, and posted additional updates on May 22 and May 24. The net effect was that some artwork that was previously considered acceptable on FA is no longer considered acceptable. This change did not find favor with some artists and other FA users.

At least some artists seem to have increased their usage of smaller furry art sites in response. This is easiest to see on the past-year graphs for the lower-volume sites that Furbitron monitors; look for a slight increase in the post rate starting just after mid-May, 2023:

https://furbitron.com/site-furrynetwork-0365.html

https://furbitron.com/site-sofurry-0365.html

https://furbitron.com/site-weasyl-0365.html

You can also somewhat see the increased post rate on the year-on-year graphs for the lower-volume sites; look at the white line, starting just before day 150:

https://furbitron.com/site-furrynetwork-yoy1.html

https://furbitron.com/site-sofurry-yoy1.html

https://furbitron.com/site-weasyl-yoy1.html

The data for Buzzly and e621 don't reflect an "FA bump" at this time.

Buzzly

Buzzly is projected to have about 18,400 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 91% lower than the 215,000 submission IDs in 2022.

Buzzly launched in late 2021, and experienced fast growth through early 2022; during that time, it often had days with 1,000 new posts a day.

Around February and March 2022, there were some communications from Buzzly staff, and changes in their acceptable upload policy, that did not find favor with many of their users.

As a result, the post rate at Buzzly dropped off a lot in mid-March 2022. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, Buzzly is averaging about 50 new posts a day.

FurAffinity

FurAffinity is projected to have about 4,620,000 submissions in 2023. This would be 10% lower than the 5,140,000 submissions in 2022, and would mark the third year ever where FA would not have year-on-year growth.

FA's upload policy changes in March 2023, mentioned above, do not yet seem to have made a significant impact on the post rate at FA. On the other hand, that change has only been in place for about a month and a half as of this writing. The effect, if any, may become more apparent in the future.

Going strictly by the numbers, FurAffinity will probably reach submission ID 55,000,000 around December 20, 2023.

In reality, it will probably happen a few days sooner than that - as the submission IDs increase, more people will post submissions, hoping to have the 55,000,000th submission.

FurryNetwork

FurryNetwork is projected to have about 52,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 18% higher than the 44,000 submission IDs in 2022.

SoFurry

SoFurry is projected to have about 142,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 4.0% higher than the 136,600 submissions in 2022.

SoFurry reached submission ID 2,000,000 on June 10, 2023.

Weasyl

Weasyl is projected to have about 135,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 24% higher than the 109,000 submission IDs in 2022.

e621

e621 is projected to have about 725,000 submission IDs in 2023. This is 6.0% higher than the 684,000 submission IDs in 2022, and would continue e621's history of year-on-year submission ID growth since 2009.

Notes and disclaimers

These are linear extrapolations to 2023-12-31, based on data from 2023-01-01 to 2023-07-11.

The submission ID counts in this post have been rounded off. They should be accurate to within 1% or so.

The owners of the various sites can directly query their site's database, so they may publish slightly different numbers than are found here.

The numbers here come from Furbitron's monitoring of the sites listed. The historical data was mostly gathered from the sites in September 2021. e621 provides a dump of their site database, so the historical data for e621 came from that dump in September 2021. Since then, Furbitron has done "live" monitoring of each site, once a day.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

Inkbunny is missing from the list

wolfmanfur said:
Inkbunny is missing from the list

Furbitron does not monitor InkBunny, and there are no plans for it to do that.

furbitron said:
Furbitron does not monitor InkBunny, and there are no plans for it to do that.

So you expect us to find your data on an "FA bump" interesting while completely omitting the most notable beneficiary?

Ngl, not including IB is a pretty big omission. It is one of the big 3 furry sites only behind FA and e6. I'm having trouble understanding why IB is excluded but a newer and MUCH smaller site like Buzzly is included.

Idk, something about that just seems lacking to me but hey, it's not my tool, the only thing I can do is just state my opinion.

IB posts stats at https://inkbunny.net/stats.php. Not sure if there's any way to get historical data, but wouldn't be hard to track it over time if not.

wat8548 said:
So you expect us to find your data on an "FA bump" interesting while completely omitting the most notable beneficiary?

I expect at least a couple of different things.

I expect to be able to view, share, discuss, commission, and make furry artwork, without having to talk to the police about it. I feel that having my server show up regularly in the access logs at InkBunny is at odds with that expectation.

I expect people to understand the difference between algorithm-driven platforms (Twitter, famously) and non-algorithm-driven ones (e621 forums). In algorithm-driven forums, it is often advantageous to reply in the snarkiest way possible, to get that ratio. In non-algorithm-driven forums, replying that way has no benefit. From experience here and on Github (of all places), I have had to lower this expectation somewhat; many people are dedicated to having Twitter-style discussions everywhere.

It's not a case of having the data and choosing not to share it. Since it launched in fall 2021, Furbitron has never collected data on InkBunny. Since it launched in fall 2021, this has been documented on Furbitron's About page.

thehuskyk9 said:
I'm having trouble understanding why IB is excluded but a newer and MUCH smaller site like Buzzly is included.

See above for why Furbitron doesn't support InkBunny.

Furbitron added Buzzly partly because of its fast growth at the time, and partly for a technical reason.

When Furbitron added support for Buzzly in February 2022, Buzzly was still experiencing very fast growth. If the submission rate at Buzzly had stayed at the same level for all of 2022 as it was in January and February 2022, it would have probably had over a million new posts that year. That would have been better than every other site except FA, as a yearly rate. Put another way, in roughly a year and half of being online, Buzzly would have reached a post count that it took SoFurry about 10 years to reach, e621 about 9.5 years to reach, and Weasyl about 3.5 years to reach.

Obviously, the post rate at Buzzly has declined substantially since spring 2022. I still think it's interesting to have on the charts, as an example (among other things) of what poorly-received policy changes look like.

The technical reason was that Buzzly uses a GraphQL API, which Furbitron didn't yet support. It was interesting to figure out how to add support for it; I got help from someone who had worked with GraphQL APIs before. I don't get paid to work on Furbitron, so "would this be fun to code" is one of the criteria. I also thought it might be useful in case some future art site also had a GraphQL API.

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

furbitron said:
I expect to be able to view, share, discuss, commission, and make furry artwork, without having to talk to the police about it. I feel that having my server show up regularly in the access logs at InkBunny is at odds with that expectation.

w-wait...
you're worried about your server being shown to access IB, but not e6? e6 is like, worse, isn't it? I mean, other than text posts and stuff below the quality standards, e6 hosts all of the same kind of content as IB, and then some, since posts containing humans are allowed.

unless you think IB is dangerous for some reason other than the content hosted there.

furbitron said:
See above for why Furbitron doesn't support InkBunny.

That's what I suspected and see above this comment as to why I think that's very arbitrary. e6 allows the same content as IB, the only real difference is the sites' reputations. This should be more focused about the statistical data rather than the type of content is presented. When I usually gather statistical data, if I'm able to, I'd like to include all possible sources of what I'm collecting so that I can provide a conclusive and accurate graph/chart to present the results, especially if the source list is not that long. No one here is trying to be snarky or throw jabs for internet points, we're having a discussion and posing legitimate questions. I'm not expecting you or anyone else working on the project to be picture-perfect or even cater to other folks' requests (especially if it's a passion project), it's just that when you're gathering data on the most-visited furry art sites and you leave out one of the biggest furry sites due to personal reasons, it makes the data incomplete. But I digress.

Other than that, I'm glad you've explained the technical reason for Buzzly's inclusion. I didn't know about Buzzly using GraphQL API, so that's pretty neat to learn about.

scth said:
IB posts stats at https://inkbunny.net/stats.php. Not sure if there's any way to get historical data, but wouldn't be hard to track it over time if not.

Thank you for that. I'm a big stat nerd, and it confirmed that IB's submission amount is almost as much as Weasyl's yet more than SoFurry's, and their userbase is about 56% smaller than e6.

thehuskyk9 said:
That's what I suspected and see above this comment as to why I think that's very arbitrary. e6 allows the same content as IB, the only real difference is the sites' reputations. This should be more focused about the statistical data rather than the type of content is presented. When I usually gather statistical data, if I'm able to, I'd like to include all possible sources of what I'm collecting so that I can provide a conclusive and accurate graph/chart to present the results, especially if the source list is not that long. No one here is trying to be snarky or throw jabs for internet points, we're having a discussion and posing legitimate questions. I'm not expecting you or anyone else working on the project to be picture-perfect or even cater to other folks' requests (especially if it's a passion project), it's just that when you're gathering data on the most-visited furry art sites and you leave out one of the biggest furry sites due to personal reasons, it makes the data incomplete. But I digress.

Other than that, I'm glad you've explained the technical reason for Buzzly's inclusion. I didn't know about Buzzly using GraphQL API, so that's pretty neat to learn about.

Thank you for that. I'm a big stat nerd, and it confirmed that IB's submission amount is almost as much as Weasyl's yet more than SoFurry's, and their userbase is about 56% smaller than e6.

OP does seem to be dodging why InkBunny won't be included. To be clear, that's entirely within their rights, but it comes off more as being a personal grievance than anything else.

The site also shows they don't want to open source the code (again, for entirely unstated reasons), so someone else just setting that up isn't going to happen unless they code their own.

peacethroughpower said:
OP does seem to be dodging why InkBunny won't be included. To be clear, that's entirely within their rights, but it comes off more as being a personal grievance than anything else.

The site also shows they don't want to open source the code (again, for entirely unstated reasons), so someone else just setting that up isn't going to happen unless they code their own.

It is what it is. Here's to hoping for other new sites like Itaku get included in the future when possible. With an impressive tool like this, I'm curious to see how the numbers stack up against other sites

furbitron said:
It's not a case of having the data and choosing not to share it. Since it launched in fall 2021, Furbitron has never collected data on InkBunny. Since it launched in fall 2021, this has been documented on Furbitron's About page.

https://furbitron.com/about.html#whynot said:

Why doesn't Furbitron support a certain art site?

Furbitron will not support InkBunny.

Hmm. Very helpful.

thehuskyk9 said:
That's what I suspected and see above this comment as to why I think that's very arbitrary.

Arbitrary decisions abound. Furbitron doesn't cover VCL or Transfur either, and nobody has complained (yet) about those choices.

None of the code or techniques I use for Furbitron are particularly novel or unique. Probably the "trickiest" thing it does is scrape the HTML for sites that don't have an API. Anybody with some web development and coding experience could probably duplicate everything Furbitron does in a couple of days, and put their own site online.

thehuskyk9 said:
No one here is trying to be snarky or throw jabs for internet points

To be clear, that comment of mine wasn't directed at you.

thehuskyk9 said:
we're having a discussion and posing legitimate questions.

Opinions vary.

thehuskyk9 said:
Here's to hoping for other new sites like Itaku get included in the future when possible.

I've looked at including Itaku, since it seems to be gaining popularity. It seems to have a regular JSON API, which appears at first glance to support the queries needed.

On the other hand, the most feedback I've ever received about Furbitron at one time has happened in the past couple of days. Since most of that feedback is negative, the option to pull the plug on it entirely is also becoming attractive.

wat8548 said:
Hmm. Very helpful.

I wrote it just for you, bby. <3

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

furbitron said:
Opinions vary.

I agree that the unfounded, unsubstantiated racisim against sea lions is a problem that there's not enough discussion on.
---
but, honestly, I'm not even sure this is a totally analogous situation. like, you haven't even said that you disliked anything. it's all just vagaries pointing to worries about getting a knock on the door from the FBI or whatever like those are legitimate worries.

I think at this point we all know why you don't want to show InkBunny on your site but we're just a little uncomfortable that you won't say it. it's not like it's an unpopular opinion or we wouldn't understand.

furbitron said:
Arbitrary decisions abound. Furbitron doesn't cover VCL or Transfur either, and nobody has complained (yet) about those choices.

That's because neither VCL or Transfur has the same notability as IB like they used to.

To be clear, that comment of mine wasn't directed at you.

I know, that still doesn't change the fact of my statement.

I've looked at including Itaku, since it seems to be gaining popularity. It seems to have a regular JSON API, which appears at first glance to support the queries needed.

On the other hand, the most feedback I've ever received about Furbitron at one time has happened in the past couple of days. Since most of that feedback is negative, the option to pull the plug on it entirely is also becoming attractive.

Unless I'm reading something entirely different, I don't see any negative feedback towards the site itself. We're only asking for a specific reason why IB is excluded because we're curious, which you pointed us to a vague answer that was the equivalent of saying "I don't wanna." That doesn't really answer much and only created more curiosity to ask more questions.

If you're going to scrap something you put effort in after barely receiving any criticism, then that's just tragic. You need to know that when you post something to the public, public opinion will vary and you have to learn how to navigate through it to keep pushing forward. Critique from an outside perspective can be helpful at times, which is what we're trying to do, help it improve. Who knows, maybe it can turn into something that folks can regularly source from to see how well a site's health is doing or make projections of how a site will perform in the future. Sites have their own private data tracking but public data tracking is very limited, especially for a niche fandom like this.

What you do with the site is ultimately your decision, and I have no choice but to respect it. I will shut up now.

darryus said:
I agree that the unfounded, unsubstantiated racisim against sea lions is a problem that there's not enough discussion on.

That comic is so incredibly obnoxious. It's basically saying "I can say whatever I want but you're the bad guy if you disagree with me on it, no matter how respectful you are." It's like some kindergarten can't-touch-me logic.

furbitron said:

tl;dr, but as a table:

Site          Estimate   vs 2022
SoFurry         142,000   +4.0%
Weasyl          135,000  +24%

Most surprising thing for me to see is SoFurry being a more popular upload place than Weasyl.

peacethroughpower said:
That comic is so incredibly obnoxious. It's basically saying "I can say whatever I want but you're the bad guy if you disagree with me on it, no matter how respectful you are." It's like some kindergarten can't-touch-me logic.

above I kinda made it a joke, but unironically, this comic reads as pretty dang racist (or any other -ist/-phobic), because like, sea lions didn't choose to be sea lions. if you just replace "sea lions" with any racial/sexual/cultural/whatever minority, it's pretty bad.

like, benefit of the doubt here, maybe there's context in the however many hundred other strips that makes it clear that "sea lions" is a stand in for a specific thing other than generic "group I don't like" but without the context, at least, yeesh.

furbitron said:
This is a mid-year review of how the sites Furbitron monitors are projected to fare for all of 2023, and how that compares to 2022.

...

The "FA bump"

FA revised their acceptable upload policy on May 19, 2023, and posted additional updates on May 22 and May 24. The net effect was that some artwork that was previously considered acceptable on FA is no longer considered acceptable. This change did not find favor with some artists and other FA users.

...

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/

I think it will be interesting to see if the uptick in posting rate endures for these smaller sites. Will the slope return to nearly what it was before the "FA bump"? Will the slope remain a bit steeper than before? The former would indicate that a lot of users rapidly uploaded their works to these smaller sites but are not maintaining consistent uploads there, whereas the latter would indicate artists have begun posting consistently to these smaller sites (whether manually or via PostyBirb, etc.).

Thanks for compiling and presenting these data!

darryus said:
like, benefit of the doubt here, maybe there's context in the however many hundred other strips that makes it clear that "sea lions" is a stand in for a specific thing other than generic "group I don't like" but without the context, at least, yeesh.

The context is that the comic was originally published during the height of Gamergate, when any attempt to accurately describe it as a harassment campaign would get you immediately swarmed and (ironically) harassed for days on end by Gamers going "actually, it's about ethics in game journalism". If you were female, they'd probably doxx you too (shown here by the sea lion following the lady home).

I agree that the chosen metaphor was never particularly convincing, though.