Growth of YWS

For anyone who is interested, I have attached an excel worksheet with all the posting data and member data from November 2004 to October 2007, or 36 months in total. Included is the raw data, as well as four charts: total posts, total members, posts per month, members per month. If you're interested, download and peruse!

Poo, My computer only lets me see a bit of it. Looks like steady growth over all. You have a lovely site here, Nate.

*twitches*

This looks like a fun stats project!

Nate has a statistics fetish...

hehe, I'm just kidding. It looks really cool!

Fudge. My computer won't let me download it.

So what happened in month 20, when there were no new members or posts?

Still very interesting - especially the graphs!

Due to Financial problems, I had to shut the site down from late May to late July 2006. So month 20 is June 2006 when the site was completely down. It was kind of good in a way because you can see how much more popular YWS became after the shut-down.

And yes, I do have a statistics fetish!

For those that are interested, I took a break from studying to run a bunch of stat functions on the data in the excel file.

Post Predictions
To run the predictions for posts, I used a growth function in Excel, but only for the last three months (otherwise the results were totally screwed up). I ran it testing it on past data, and it had good accuracy. Whether or not that holds, we shall see...

The function predicts YWS will hit 300,000 posts in mid-February 2008, which is the same conclusion I came to a couple months ago.

October 31, 2008: ~443,000 posts

October 31, 2009: ~780,000 posts

May 31, 2010: ~1,000,000 posts

October 31, 2010: ~1,376,000 posts


Member Predictions:
Did same as above.

October 31, 2008: ~7,700 members

March 31, 2009: ~10,000 members

October 31, 2009: ~15,800 members

February 28, 2010: ~20,000 members

September 30, 2010: ~30,000 members

October 31, 2010: ~32,700 members


Correlations:

Correlation between total posts & total members: .98

Correlation between posts per month & members per month: .61


Random Fun Ones:

June 2009: First month to have 1,000 posts every day

June 2013: First month to have 100,000 posts every day

August 2017: First month to have 1,000,000 posts every day

June 2019: First month to have 1,000,000 members join

June 2023: First month to have 1,000,000 new members every single day


Please note that anything past 2009 is highly speculative! If the growth were to hold, then YWS would have 525,000,000 members & 2.6 billion posts by June 2023, which is impossible.

Nate wrote:Random Fun Ones:

June 2009: First month to have 1,000 posts every day

June 2013: First month to have 100,000 posts every day

August 2017: First month to have 1,000,000 posts every day

June 2019: First month to have 1,000,000 members join

June 2023: First month to have 1,000,000 new members every single day


Please note that anything past 2009 is highly speculative! If the growth were to hold, then YWS would have 525,000,000 members & 2.6 billion posts by June 2023, which is impossible.

Hehehe, differential equations tells me that there is some equilibrium point.

I'm curious, Nate, if you think that the growth as you outlined up untill 2009 will be bad for the site. On some poetry forums, works get shuffled down very quickly, and sometimes getting a decent amount of views and reviews is a matter of timing.
So If the site keeps expanding as you predict it will, there could be multitudes of problems having to do with each and every work not getting the wealth of attention it would enjoy today.

Ideas?

Snoink ->> Why does there have to be an equilibrium point? Personally, I think it is somewhat possible that one out of every two children on the planet will be a member of YWS by 2023

Smorgishborg ->> Growth is good, pure and simple. To handle it well, you just change and adapt as YWS already has a few times. The sites that don't handle it well (such as writing.com) haven't changed and haven't adapted; hence the problems. Indeed, writing.com has not changed one bit since it had 10,000 members (it now has 566,000). In the future, YWS will continue to adapt. As for ideas, suffice it to say they're already in the pipeline.

OO We need more Mods! *gets headache from numbers*