One of our admins has been updating the totals related to Dreamwidth Studios for a couple of days. The chart below is a copy and paste from the Dreamwidth Studios article. There really isn’t enough data to draw any conclusions but short term conclusions are still fun to make anyway.
It looks like between May 2 and May 5, a lot of new people joined and then set about importing the comments from their old LiveJournal posts. It is the three day period recorded with the most new OpenID accounts appearing. Caught in that net, to date, includes over 334,000 different LiveJournal users. Wow. Over on my LiveJournal, there has been some speculation that comment importing has largely been a move similar to that of FanLib, where users were allowed to easily move their content over in order to provide the new site with lots of additional content in order to attract new users. Comment importing is one form of quick content creation. (Though FanLib didn’t allow you to import your FanFiction.Net reviews. They just allowed you to import your stories.)
It looks like the number of active accounts peaked on May 5/6. Since then, the volume of posting by new members has been lower in terms of actives in the past 7 days and past 24 hours. To me, this suggests that people surged in to join, to name squat and to see where the service will go. As we’re talking four days in a row below the high with about 1,000 fewer people updating daily, I’m not quite ready to buy the rational that this is a weekend trend and that the numbers will pick up. The idea that people appear to be name squatting and not utilizing the service is confirmed for me because less than half of the people who have been active in some way have ever posted an entry.
The total accounts that have been active in some way seems pretty close to the number of people who were members of fandom_counts, a community with roughly around 34,000 people. I’m really curious to know how much crossover there is between the two that their numbers are so close.
Dreamwidth Studios Historical Data
| Date | Total Accounts | That are active in some way | That have ever posted an entry | That have posted an entry in last 30 days | That have posted an entry in the last 7 days | That have posted an entry in the last 24 hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2, 2009 | 228878 | 27252 | 10359 | 10324 | 8841 | 4120 |
| May 5, 2009 | 286805 | 34106 | 14117 | 14080 | 12592 | 5034 |
| May 6, 2009 | 301085 | 36333 | 15603 | 15564 | 14077 | 4845 |
| May 7, 2009 | 314431 | 38106 | 16871 | 16819 | 15294 | 3882 |
| May 9, 2009 | 321405 | 38879 | 17564 | 17493 | 13172 | 2824 |
| May 10, 2009 | 323769 | 39087 | 17786 | 17710 | 12115 | 2912 |
| May 11, 2009 | 328542 | 39514 | 18157 | 18054 | 11055 | 3420 |
| May 12, 2009 | 334359 | 39948 | 18576 | 18450 | 10352 | 3561 |
