Read the Docs 2013 Stats

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:

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:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/m1xjc5jemlql6i2/Screenshot%202013-12-21%2009.28.51.png

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 fantasticly 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.



Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!