Can anyone give me an educated or statistical estimate on how many Blender users are in the world? Does Ton or anybody else have some official statistics about Blender users in term of age, usage purpose and so on?
I am working on a possible business plan and I need some numbers to see if the plan is viable.
Thanks for help.
Well, what’s your scouter say?
I wouldn’t mind knowing this as well.
“Blender users” is pretty vague. I use blender to make a living. I have a friend that uses it once in a blue moon for some graphic help he cant do in a different tool, and I know a few people that say “they use it”.
Does your busines plan work with all of of us or is there a specific kind of user that you are looking for? How many users may be irrelevant. How many users at a certain skill level that might need your product/service is a completely different questions.
You can find some stats about the blender.org website but they are old and don’t cover very much. Probably not the detail your looking for.
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/website-statistics/
Someone needs to count unique ip’s downloading from blender.org and graphicall.org
At this moment all I have is an idea fermenting in my head. That’s why I would love to have some estimates - overall numbers and then specific usage to see if the project is worth any consideration.
Too bad there are no updates on those numbers but that will certainly help for start.
Thanks.
It’s not really possible to get accurate numbers on the amount of blender users. But is that really what you are interested in, if you’re doing a business plan? I’d rather be interested in sales related to blender usage.
I can tell you the amount of people willing to join the blender development fund: 200 (totaling less than 2000 EUR monthly)
A pretty disappointing figure, but a lot of people probably don’t even know that the fund exists.
It also would be interesting to know the amount of active blenderartists.org users, maybe a moderator can give info on that.
As for the user distribution, there’s some good information in The Great Blender Survey.
Man I totally forgot about that survey. Thanks for reminder. 
Maybe You could go with the amount of Blender downloads?
Downloaded.com says that Blender 2.65 was downloaded 374 279 times since it got out, maybe You could ask for figures from blender.org and graphicall.org as well.
Just a thought!
Even that wouldn’t be accurate, considering the fact that Blender is in the package repositories of nearly every desktop Linux distribution and freely bundled with a number of books and magazines (and open movie projects).
Download statistics per version from blender.org and graphicall.org would at least provide an objective basis to estimate the order of magnitude of the number of users.
Not sure if this helps but the number of members on blender artist is about 125,000
It’s an objective number that only tells you how many downloads there have been. That number has no valid relation to the number of users because one download != one user. A single download could represent any number of users (including zero, for people who download and dump, or less than one, for people who download multiple times for different machines).
I don’t know how many users but i wonder why the big studios don’t use blender for big projects. I don’t know the making Hollywood movies or video games with blender. Mostly Maya, Houdini or C4D using. Why not Blender ?
Who wants to use subscription donations?, it’s like a monthly bill/chore, like paying rates… we don’t know how the money will make any difference or what any targets are for that to happen.
If you look at the page I’ve linked, you can read what the money has been used on in the past - and what the major open issue is (the dependency graph rewrite). The reason that it is a subscription is that you can plan ahead (at least to some degree) how much permanent income there is going to be over the course of a few months, which is what you need if you wanted to hire an extra developer.
Here’s the reality of user-funded Blender development so far: It is unsustainable. The Compositor rewrite, the particle nodes, neither of these things would’ve completed funding without the development fund, even though they had fundraisers of their own. People knew of the targets, people donated - but it wasn’t enough.
because the Blender users alwalys crying for new features but does not make good things
pikachu
They do use Blender for some stuff. I’ve heard about Blender being used for cloth and fluid simulation for feature films but mostly it is being used for UV unwrapping.
The reason being that in the big industry they use the most efficient tool for the job, which in most cases is not Blender.
Large studios don’t care about paying big bucks if the software is well supported by the companies that make them!
To give You an idea, a yearly subscription to Softimage cost 810 USD, that’s not the software, it’s only a support package with additional features attached to it.
In essence, time is money, better support means no Blender for large studios besides the occasional blip!