It is difficult for R package authors to know how much (if at all) their packages are being used. CRAN does not calculate or make public download statistics (though this might change in the relatively near future), so authors can’t tell if 10 or 10,000 people are using their work.

Deducer is in much the same boat. We can’t know how many people are downloading it, but we can get an idea of its usage by looking at how many people are accessing the online manual. The site recently passed the quarter of a million page view milestone, with close to 75k visits.

Deducer.org is now consistently getting over 3,000 page views a week, which is about 4-5 times greater than the same time 2 years ago. Traffic growth seems pretty consistant and surprisingly linear, indicating that we have a solid user base and adoption is progressing at a good rate. Exactly what the size of that user base is and the rate of adoption is something that can’t really be answered with raw traffic data, but the trends look unequivocally good.

With the addition of add-on packages like DeducerSpatial and DeducerPlugInScaling created by myself and a budding community of developers, I am very optimistic about the outlook for continued growth. If you have not given Deducer a try, either for personal use or in the classroom, now is a great time to start.

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