Charming! Anyways back to the point, jonas, what's the growth in the usage like? Obviously 100,000 odd unique ips per year is an interesting insight into the community but I would be interested to know what the growth in unique ips over the past few years has been.

Obviously you can look to the codes to provide data on the increased usage of CFD but I would have thought that monitoring the growth of the usage of this site must also be a good indicator as it is likely to encompass student usage and interest more.

There is a growth-graph here:

http://www.cfd-online.com/About/

It shows number of page-downloads per month over the last 7 years. Growth rate has been around 25%-30% annually in the last few years. The number of unique visitors is growing a bit slower, I'd guess about 20% annualy. Last year the figure was 24%.

I checked the stats again and it seems as if my memory of 100,000 unique visitors was an old figure for a 6-month period. Sorry about that. In 2004 CFD Online was visited by 297,801 unique IP addresses.

Yea, I agree, but all those unique visitors are not necessarily frequent users of CFD Online. Over a whole year it is quite likely that a CFD engineer at least once will stumble over a page at CFD Online when googling or whatever even if he is not aware of CFD Online and visits it frequently.

There is also another thing which affects this number - some people who use dial-up etc. have a dynamic IP number allocation. This means that they will often get a new IP number (out of a pool of available numbers) each time they log in. Then they would be counted as more than one unique user. On the other hand many large companies have a common web-proxy so that all employees who visit CFD Online will appear as on IP address and count as only one uniqe visitors. For large companies, like Volvo, Boeing, GM, Ford, ... this can skew the visitor count significantly. Counting actual real uniqe persons is difficult.

I prefer to look at the weekly figure (about 15,000 unique IP addresses per week). I think that is quite representative for the number of people who are using CFD Online regularly. And I agree with you that there might be a factor of 5 or 10 more CFD engineers who do not visit CFD Online every week.

This is very true, certainly I log on from home and at work and at work we have a proxy so I guess that distorts the numbers a bit.

Cool down,all

"What kind of idiot asks this question?"

Anyone in the business of selling CFD would want to know what the market size is so they can estimate their share and their potential for growth. Just like any other commodity.