Number of Director Developers = ???

March 15th, 2009

This past week a FOSE 2009 took place. I’m not sure what FOSE stands for but the event was a technology tradeshow and conference for government IT. Someone from Adobe was speaking and said that there are about 200,000 Director developers.

Is that number larger than you thought? Smaller? Needless to say, this sparked a bit of discussion on the Direct-L mailing list this week. Does the number indicate “active” developers? People that occasionally use Director to maintain old content? Hard to say.

Several people that run sites talked about their stats*, and that brought up more issues. I personally know that stats can “show” most anything you choose. Using Google stats you can at least be sure you have the same program doing the analysis. 🙂

German Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 290,512 (1 year)

International Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 22,195 (11 months since launch)

Dean’s Director Tutorials
Absolute Unique Visitors: almost 65,000 (1 year)

And here at Director @ Night
Absolute Unique Visitors: 18,484 (11 months, was down for 1 month)

So what does this mean? Hard to say. I do know that this site does very little, but I still get visitors. I’d love to see stats on the Adobe Forums. Personally I think the 200k number is a bit high, but I would be willing to go with 100k. The bigger item of interest (to us Director developers) will be what happens to this number in the next few years as the new versions of Director get released. Amazon still shows Director 11.5 for April 4th. Adobe has been at the Game Developers Conference the past two years, so marketing is increasing. I even saw an ad for Director on my gmail page.

So are there 200,000 Director developers out there? As a Magic 8-ball might say, “Ask again later.”

*Stats are from Martin and Dean on Direct-L

Entry Filed under: Daily thoughts,Director PR

2 Comments Add your own

  • 1. jamie  |  March 25th, 2009 at 12:03 am

    …just one.

    I’ll turn the lights out when I’m done.

  • 2. hanford  |  March 30th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    My guess is that their 200,000 number is based roughly off of the number of upgrades sold.

    Here’s why I think this:

    1. They’re still developing it, with many employees behind it. They wouldn’t do that if they weren’t making money.

    2. I spoke with a rep for director and he told me it was Adobe’s biggest money maker and they said it was their biggest money maker for the business unit Director is in.

    3. As director is an older product, their userbase will skew older and have older habits, including not posting or participating in online communities. I know I had been using Director for 6 years before ever joining a forum. The vast majority of ANY products users will never leave a digital footprint on the internet.

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