This past month, especially since SR2 on Feb. 24, we have noticed a large uptake in our web site traffic and downloads. We have already surpassed 1 million downloads of SR2 in less than 8 days; normally it would take close to 30 days.
Denis and I decided to do some research. First, Denis did all the checks to make sure we weren’t getting a denial of service. During a sample 24 hours period the IP address with the most downloads was an address at Samsung in Korea; they downloaded Eclipse 89 times. It really doesn’t look like someone is trying to take our site down.
I then did some analysis of our Google Analytics stats. Comparing the stats from February 2011 with the stats from February 2012 a trend starts to emerge.
- Overall visits have increased from 2.5 million to 3.2 million and unique visitors has increased from 1.6 million to 2 million. Roughly a 25% increase in overall traffic.
- Traffic from Asia has increased 46%. We now get more traffic from Asia than the Americas. Americas traffic is up 19% and Europe 23%. Europe is our #1 region.
- Traffic from China is up 80%, India 52% and South Korea 30%, interesting Spain is up 28%.
Understanding the reason is not all the easy but there are a few indications.
- developer.android.com is the #1 referral of traffic to eclipse.org and overall our #3 source of traffic. Overall traffic from this site increased overall 35%. Traffic originating from India increased by 93% and China 3800% (A case of small numbers, in Feb 2011 there were 183 actual visits and in Feb. 2012 it rose to 7,255)
- Searches from baidu (Chinese search engine) rose 179% and baidu is now the #4 source of traffic. Searches from Google increased 37% and those Google search from India rose 74%.
- To give credit, bing search has increase 51% and is now #8 source of traffic. stackoverflow.com rose 103% and is now #9.
It certainly seems like Android development is driving some of the increased traffic but certainly not all of it. It really appears Eclipse is becoming very popular in China, India and South Korea. I would love to have more insight into why? We don’t have many connections into these countries, particularly China and Korea, so it would be nice to hear direct from the Eclipse community in these countries. What can we at the Foundation do to help better support these countries? It would also be great to get more mirrors located in these countries so you would have faster downloads and our bandwidth would be saved.
Feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail (ian.skerrett@eclipse.org)
UPDATE: A nice wiki site for the Eclipse community in South Korea http://eclipse.or.kr/
