How many people are on the DU?

[applegrove]

Not regular posters necessarily. In total.

10,000? 20,000? Someone asked me today and I think I knee jerked to saying 30,000.

[Totally Tunsie]

1. Apparently, many more than that!

I thought at one time the number of registered members was posted on the site, and I seem to recall it was around 220,000+. According to Wikipedia, the number was over 122,000 in 2008, so it's definitely possible the 220,000+ is accurate. I'd suspect this number is for total registrations over time, and not current registrations only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Underground
As of June 2008, over 122,000 user accounts were registered and over 38 million messages had been posted.

I'll bet EarlG knows!

[applegrove]

3. Thank you. I was totally wrong. LOL!

[Totally Tunsie]

4. Here's a more current number:

https://thehiveindex.com/communities/democratic-underground/
About the Democratic Underground community
Democratic Underground is an online community for Politics with roughly 269K members. It uses a forum format for communication.

It is, however, undated.

[applegrove]

5. Thanks again.

[DFW]

6. That amazes me

From the number of posts I see and the names associated with those posts, I had assumed a maximum of 2,000 current active members. Fifty times that just blows me away.

[applegrove]

7. I was thinking the highest rec counts are like 400.

If 400 are 5% of DU then that would make 8000. So I was way off.

[Totally Tunsie]

9. Just to clarify, my interpretation is that the 269K represents all-time registered members,

meaning that it includes all original members and all who have joined since, many who have left the site, many who have passed on, those who are banned and, finally, the rest of us. For certain, it does not represent only current active members; we'd never be able to log in and subsequently make a post! Does that sound more plausible?

[Violet_Crumble]

8. Are you wanting to know how many people visit the site?

I'm assuming Earl G may have GA set up as it helps to see where traffics coming from and when the peak usage times are and lots of other interesting stuff. You could try asking him if he does use analytics for DU and whether he'd share some basic stats with you.

[applegrove]

10. No I have the answer to my question. I wanted the all time total.

[MineralMan]

11. I know there's a number larger than 200,000 who are registered members.

How many are active, participating users is harder to pin down. If you look at the View count on any page of DU, you'll see that it's rare to see view counts for threads over about 2000. That's not an accurate figure, of course, because each time that thread goes to someone's screen, it is counted.

My guess about active, posting DUers comes to about 2500 on average. There are many others who only read threads and never post. Probably the owners of DU can come a lot closer, because they can probably see a count of how many unique visitors show up on any given day. I assume they could see that number, anyhow.

So, really the number of DUers is hard to come up with. I don't know. I'd like to think it's lots and lots, but there is that view count to keep in mind. That's my concept of how many are likely to see a post I make here. View counts are important if that's interesting to you.