Community¶

This year, we had:

• 27 people who committed code (-41% from last year)
• 1931 commits (+54%)
• 800 issues - 630 closed, 170 open (+60%)

We have a much lower number of people who committed to the code-base this year, while increasing the number of commits and issues by over 50%. This is mainly because we worked with Gregor for three months after our fundraiser.

The lack of committers is sad though, and I hope that we can get more people involved with the project over time. It really is unsustainable at the current level of community involvement. All of our operations and user support tasks are done by vanishingly small number of volunteers, with no new growth in that group of folks.

Interested in contributing? We have documentation on contributing on the site. You can also contribute financially at our sustainability page or by buying a monthly Gold subscription.

Page Views¶

Our stats:

• 170 Million Page Views (+55%)
• 38 Million Unique Visitors (+58%)

Page view growth has been steady again this year. It’s great to see so many people reading documentation that we are hosting.

We remain one of the largest sites on the internet, and that doesn’t account for traffic to CNAME’s, which is another 40% of our traffic.

Site Stats¶

The stats, in total numbers:

• 28000 projects (+85%)
• 39001 users (+75%)

Read the Docs has some high profile projects that push a lot of traffic. There are however thousands of smaller libraries and projects that fill out that full range of documentation that we host. We are happy to host documentation for all open source projects, and are glad the community finds the services useful.

Funding¶

Our hosting costs are sponsored by Rackspace, which is fantastically generous of them.

Development on Read the Docs is funded by the community. We launched a Sustainabilty Campaign earlier this year that funded work for 3 months. It was great to have help with our support workflow.

We are launching a new user-supported funding model this year, and we hope to be able to bring someone on to work on support in a more permanent basis.

Conclusion¶

2015 has been a year of mixed result. We have continued growing and serving more traffic. However, our contributor base shrank, and we haven’t been doing a good job of supporting users in the second half of the year.

We hope that with renewed funding we’ll be able to better support users in 2016.