npm's Year in Numbers: 2014

A small part of my job at npm is keep track of various performance metrics. This helps make sure our systems are working and aren’t hiding any slow-growing performance problems, that we are appropriately planning for future growth, and that our business goals as a company are based on reality. Also, I like making spreadsheets.

With that in mind, here’s a collection of numbers, some of which I actively track and some I just decided to look at, and how they’ve changed from January 1 to December 31, 2014:

Number of full-time employees:

Jan 1: 0
Dec 31: 11
Growth rate: infinity! If we keep this up by this time next year everyone in the universe will be an npm employee.

Number of packages in the registry:

Jan 1: 53,459 (estimate)
Dec 31: 115,194
Growth rate: 2.1x.

Total downloads, previous 30 days:

Jan 1: 149,822,000 (estimate)
Dec 31: 648,620,794
Growth rate: 4.3x, and our true growth is actually a little higher because the last week has been really quiet because of end-of-year holidays.

Number of mascots:

Jan 1: 0
Dec 31: 1

It’s a long story, but we’ve acquired a wombat and we like him. Thanks, Jon!

Average weekday downloads (approximate)

Jan 1: 6,024,000
Dec 31: 25,000,000

Average weekend downloads (approximate):

Jan 1: 3,000,000
Dec 31: 12,000,000

We list these separately because it still comes as a surprise to many people that Node.js is more popular during the week than on the weekend. People use npm to do grown-up stuff!

Why did downloads grow twice as fast as the number of packages? Because there are more people using them. How many exactly is quite tricky. Here’s some ways we can try measuring:

Registered developers:

Jan 1: 21,000 (very rough estimate)
Dec 31: 83,317
Growth rate: 4x. Right now, the only people who usually bother to register are people who are publishing packages.

Weekly unique visitors to the npm website:

January 18 (first day we have data): 113,000
Dec 20 (last week before holidays): 264,000
Growth rate: 2.3x

Total unique users on npm website in 2014:

5,444,000

Total pageviews in 2014:

35,000,000

The top 10 countries using npm:

1. USA
2. UK
3. India
4. Germany
5. France
6. Canada
7. China*
8. Russia
9. Japan
10. Brazil

(* Chinese npm users run a lot of mirrors and translated sites, so actual usage of npm in China is probably higher)

How about the npm software itself?

Total commits to all npm repos:

2013: 919
2014: 3360
Growth rate: 3.6x

Some stats we don’t have over time, but will if we do this post next year:

Unique IPs hitting the registry, last 7 days:

1,402,000 (estimate)

Unique website users, last 90 days:

2.1M

Total repos:

154

Open issues:

1,173

Closed issues:

6,889

All of which is to say: it was a very good year, and it’s all thanks to lovely users like you turning up every day and using our software and our services, and we’re really happy you did. Happy 2015!