Fantastic!

is probably not exactly the word you’d use to describe vvvv’s 2019 numbers. If you can’t handle bumpy roads, please set your Damper to ~2s before reading on… Not sure what this is all about? Check out last year’s numbers of 2018 to make yourself familiar with this vvvvery tradition. Then pull yourself together:

Webwise

While we still don’t have any new numbers from vvvv.org itself we do have what the forum tracks. It shows us different statistics regarding user engagement over time that are generally, how can I put this… not improving recently. The most uplifting I found was this:

DAU/MAU - daily divided by monthly active users

According to the description of the graph, this indicates your stickiness in % and 30% is to be aimed at. Even though overall fewer things are happening on the forum you keep sticking around. Who could blame you, after all, it is rather cozy around here. Here is another one that doesn’t look all too bad:

Page Views

Ignore the red ones (crawlers) but see the rather constant number of logged-in users (dark blue) and the curious spikes at the end of December from anonymous users (light blue). Are these already the harbingers of numbers to expect when we finally will have an official 1.0 of vvvv gamma out? (hums) Dreams are my reality…

Not really numbers, but still interesting, here is a listing of top forum search terms in order of your priority:

Downloads

* x86 and x64 combined

What can we say? Only 1 release was really lame. But was it? Ok, yes, it was, but the way I’d like to whitewash these numbers a bit is that they are only reflecting vvvv beta, when obviously most of our work (to some of your’s concern) went into VL and vvvv gamma. And inconveniently we don’t have any numbers for vvvv gamma downloads at all. But then again those wouldn’t be high numbers also because as you know we’re still keeping a rather low profile with vvvv gamma, mostly advertising it to you as long as it is still in preview. So anyway, nothing to be particularly proud of here. Moving on…

Licenses

vvvv.org income through licenses and dongles sold

Phew, not as bad as the declining number of downloads would have suggested. Certainly not an upwards trend but still the 4th best result so far. So let’s see what this number is composed of:

Mkay, so according to the number of individual commercial users we’re basically thrown back to 2012. Quite a bummer but to be expected when you put most of your resources into R&D for the shiny new product that just still isn’t there yet to make its own money. We were certainly hoping to keep a few more of you with our advances in VL but we know that before making any new friends, VL needs to grow out of vvvv beta and get a 3d engine…

That was it? Far from! This year we held by far the largest number of workshops for onboarding new users. These included a series of 8 free introductory workshops and 8 full-day workshops on various topics in Berlin. Further, we toured Kiel, Linz, Timișoara and Moscow. Also, we held 10 meetups and 3 patching circles in Berlin, one meetup in Hamburg and one in Moscow. Finally, we even held a dedicated Teaching Patching mini-conference to better understand the needs for vvvv in education.

All these activities will see a continuation in 2020 and culminate in NODE20 in October. Until then, the road to NODE is filled with some precious gemstones:

• The first official release of vvvv gamma that you can finally own for money, already available for preview
• Initial release of 3d engine for vvvv gamma, still work-in-progress
• Polished libraries to support your basic needs
• More workshops and learning opportunities

Is 2020 finally the year of the future of visual programming or is the world not ready for VL yet? Stay tuned, spread the word and become part of a truly wonderful new numbers blog post next year! You know what to do…

We wish you what! Yours, vvvv.