How big is Daz3D's community (limited to this website or not)?
tayloranderson2047
Posts: 116
Just out of curiosity, I wonder how big is Daz3D's community in total? Are there any not-so-rough estimates (say rounded to closest hundreds/thousands). I only know from wikipedia that "Daz 3D has a library of over 5 million assets for Daz Studio" (till Sep 2021).
More specifically, how many artists are there (those who ever posted rendered stuff)? How many assets creators (number of those who published at least one asset in Daz shop)? How many registered users are there for Daz3D? How many active users for the forums here? I am happy to know the answer to any of these...
My question is not limitted to our website (although this may already give a very good estimate). I am also happy to know the infomation about the user base of other platforms like renderosity or renderhub if anyone knows.
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I believe DAZ has ( or had ) figures for the number of downloads of the studio application, but how many of those are active users I suspect is unknown.
It is generally accepted that the forums here are only a fraction of the customer base, if only because not everyone can communicate in English. To that, there are German, Japanese, and Spanish speaking customer directed sites. Other languages too. There are dedicated DevArt groups, facebook groups etc. Even sharecg has regular DS specific content releases.
While I don't have the numbers, I do know there is a heavy Daz user presence on DeviantArt and social media. There's activity on a LOT of sites and growing every day (Instagram is a good example. I have new accounts follow me every day. Or I find new accounts). A lot of folks use Daz in their art, but don't mention they use Daz (it's obvious when you recognize the model or asset in the scene). Some artists use Daz for making concept art, reference, etc. Outside of Daz actually giving the total active users, I don't think there's an easy way to find out the size of the community in total.
I was a bit astonished about the "5 million" assets and read the source article of that information at Wikipedia (here), assets not meaning products, but all the different items contained in the about 43000 products in the store:
More interesting could be the 20 million Images and animations created by Studio users annually, and the 3million downloads and roughly $100 million paid to the contributing artists since 2000.
One of their staff said back in 2016 that they had reached 3 million registered users.
There is probably a decent size user base beyond this website... Over the years in searching for information on CGI topics, I've come across a couple of small websites in Japan, a couple in South America and possibly one in Poland... these were small websites which might have been more like blogs or personal websites, but there seemed to be a lot of different people responding and based on the dialogue translated, the individuals posting seemed to be knowledgeable about the software... but it's been a while, so who knows if they are still out there or if they've gone the way of most small websites.
But that's a highly deceptive number as someone has to register simply to use the free software download, even if they end up only using it for a short time or... as a number of the people I've recommended it to have reported, gotten so frustrated with the incredibly poor documentation that they just give up. Also, consider that in 2012 Google SketchUp was reporting registrations of 30 million users annually, and yet Google ultimately deemed SketchUp not profitible enough to keep up themselves and sold it off to Trimble.
I think a better way to look at it is how big the market is for DAZ products, and it's been documented several times (including by reliable sources like Richard Haseltine) that that many vendors consider selling a hundred units of an item to be a sucessful product.
One way of attempting to gauge it is to do your own estimates.
When I re-started with DS in April 2019, there were about 190,000 images at Renderosity in the DS gallery. There are now nearly 302,000. The number of users at Rendo is rarely less than 2800 at any time I look, sometimes up to 4800. There are freebie downloads for G8 figures exceeding 22,000 downloads. It's unlikely a large number of people will download the same thing more than once, say 10% max. That puts a lower limit on the number of users. I have 118 freebies with more than 1000 downloads there, with no apparent tail-off on the long term trend even for the freebie with around 3800 downloads. I only do boring, everyday stuff, not fancy figure asset stuff. So.. 20,000 downloaders for the best stuff seems that they may be coming close to saturating Rendo's DS user base, though there are very old poser assets with 80k+downloads.
So, how to guess at the user base from those figures? Difficult one. I'd guess that Renderosity is known by between 1% & 10% of users. So that would make a guess of 200,000 to 2million users based on downloads of most popular downloads. Correlate with users.. 20,000 occasionally active at the Rendo site, averaging 2 images per person per year... doesn't sound excessive as an average when you look at many random users who have zero image uploads. There are definitely a number who produce lots and a lot who bring the average down. Then as a wild guess to narrow th 1% to 10% guess above I'd plump for 5% of DS users knowing about Rendo, giving 20,000/.05 = 400k regular users. Feels likely based on 3 million registered downloaders at DAZ and the fact the software is free, so people won't be charged to download it and feel obliged to use it anyway if they find it's not what they want.
So, an awful lot of guesses, but the numbers do seem to feel about right based on the small amount cross referenceable information available. Confidence level in the 400k regular user figure? Low!
Regards,
Richard.
Without access to Daz's own numbers, we have no reliable way of estimating the size of the user base. Most free-to-try software will be tried and forgotten by the users. Nothing unique to Daz Studio there. But I suspect that Daz's numbers may involve low retention & high churn. Registered downloaders isn't going to be a reliable indicator:
1. The software is complex enough that high retention would really only be possible with quality efforts at documentation and customer education, and Daz is unwilling to spend significant resources in those areas. Many of the registered users will find the software too difficult or too frustrating to keep using it.
2. Some will be unwilling to tolerate processes like dForce or rendering which require them to either wait passively or to find something else to do in the meantime.
3. Hardware limitations: Some will find that their computers freeze or crash too frequently for Daz Studio to be usable. Or the performance is unacceptably slow.
4. Some will have little lasting motivation to create their own art. They're satisfied looking at the work of others, or not really very interested in visual arts in general. (Again, not specific to Daz.)
We can't draw many conclusions from the number of uploads of images to various sites. A thousand people uploading only two images per week for one year gets you to 100,000 uploaded images. Over a few years, a relatively small number (thousands, not hundreds of thousands) of active uploaders can generate millions of uploaded images. And most active users are probably not uploading very often. For some, there may be some embarassment about the NSFW nature of their art, but for most of us who aren't uploading many images, we just don't care if anyone sees our renders. Why bother?
If I were Daz/Tafi, the number I would watch is the number of users who make a purchase in a quarter (or, if you prefer, a 90-day period). That's the number that I would consider as belonging to an active user base that can contribute to the company's bottom line.
richardandtracy, I'm going to respectfully disagree with you about the idea of Renderosity being largely unknown. I believe that most users who stick with Daz Studio for a meaningful length of time (or spend a meaningful amount of money) become aware of the other content shops fairly quickly. And I suspect that most of the visitors at Renderosity are gallery viewers and non-purchasing window shoppers.
DS is quite easy compared to the alternatives and the main thing isn't the program but the assets that can be used in it, or exported to other programs.
Depends on the hardware, I don't have a top of the line system by todays standards as I built the i7 based system originally in 2016. Two years ago I doubled the RAM to 64GB's, changed the old GPU to 2070 Super, which I replaced with 12GB 3060 this year, but dForcing something (which I rarely do) may take 10 minutes and rendering a scene with 2 G8 figures inside a furnished room usually takes around 15 minutes - I don't consider those times being long.
Mostly about the hardware and how it's setup, one can't tow a big rig with a Yugo, not without upgrades and working with 3D models the way we do it in DS, does take some power, not the kind of power you get from a Ferrari, but the kind of power you get with a heavy duty pickup truck.
Art comes in many forms, one is visual novels that have adopted what DAZ is offering because of the easy/lighter process compared to the alternatives and most of all the available assets, which can be used 'right out of the box'
In all likelihood the number of people who have registered at Renderosity is significantly bigger IF you are only looking at the number of bodies, simply because Renderosity 1.) supports a wider variety of product formats, 2.) maintains a huge library of freebies, 3.) has absorbed both Poser from SmithMicro and much of HiveWire, as well as many former DAZ vendors, and 4.) has generally been known as a much easier site to get started selling on for new PAs. However, I'd like to point out again that just because someone is a registered user at either DAZ or Renderosity is not really indicative of how many people are actually using the software or even visiting the site more than once or twice. Renderosity has cast a very wide net whereas DAZ, on the other hand, has continued to narrow-focus it's product line and specifically alienated a large number of Poser users during the introduction of Genesis. Since that time there have been more than a few people who only came to DAZ long enough to buy a copies of V4, M4, and their related morphs in order to use them in Poser. That's not supposition, as I know a number of people who did exactly that.
All that said, what I can say is that DAZ3D.com DOES have a much higher daily traffic rate than Renderosity.com does, by a factor of up to twenty to one, something that can be verified by pulling up the specs for both on a site like similarweb.com. In looking at numbers like that, however, one must be aware that 1.) there are many ways to increase apparent web traffic that have nothing to do with the number of discrete users, such as making users jump through multiple pages where one click would have sufficed and having extremely active forums, and 2.) as most of the rest of the of the data on sites like similar web is based on gross hits, many of the other numbers are likely to be more in the realm of educated guesses rather than reported facts when dealing with non-public companies. In other words, just because someone writes something on a fancy site doesn't make it a fact.
As far as I have understood and has been also said here before, it wasn't DAZ that broke the relationship.
Even though Renderosity now has Poser and La Fremme/Le Homme characters for it, there is still a lot of Genesis stuff over there. And there is a lot of Daz Studio stuff at the-site-that-shall-not-be-named
That does NOT change the truth of Cybersox's statement
I'm not talking about the producers of Poser at the time. I'm talking about the Poser user base, and that was really a public relations battle. Having been there through it all, it was very much the public perception that DAZ was cutting way back on the production of new V4/M4 products in favor of pushing the new Genesis products, which it should be remembered initially would not work in Poser, that started the great divide.
Keep in mind that the DAZ studio of the time was very arguably not up to the specs of Poser at the time, and many users complained loudly about essentially being forced to chose between either key features of Poser (user creatable dynamic cloth and hair, better animation tools and rendering engine, etc.) or the weight mapping, shape-changing, and auto fit of Genesis. Simultanously, many PC members who used Poser complained that most of the new PC items and freebies were Genesis specific and therefore useless to them... a complaint that is still lodged frequently every time DAZ introduces a new base figure. By the time DAZ finally released the DSON add-ons to make Genesis 1 compatible with Poser, Renderosity and RuntimeDNA had both gained a large market bump (and many former DAZ PAs) as those sites had continued to heavily support the creation of new V4 products, with RDNA even producing a weight-mapped V4 upgrade.
It might be a little enlightening to make some comparisons with Blender, which is somewhat more open about its metrics. In 2020, Blender was averaging about 3.5 million downloads per release. The general assumption is that most of those downloads do not result in a long-term active Blender user. Just the opposite: Most of the downloads led to users trying Blender once or a few times and then giving up or getting bored or just finding something else to do. It doesn't cost anything to download it, take a look at it, and give it a try.
Since Blender is available on Steam, and both Blender and Steam are tracking the number of users at any given time. In 2020, that number averaged about 3,000. That 3,000 would be just a fraction of the actual users at a given time, but it's still useful to know.
Blender is not-for-profit and partially supported by donations through "Development Memberships". In 2020, there were fewer than 2,500 development fund members. Obviously, most active users aren't making this kind of donation, but it's still a stat worth considering.
I'd guess Blender's total active user base could range between 250K and 700K. I have almost no confidence in that range.
Daz users? I'd guess 200K to 500K. Again, no confidence in that guess.
I believe that G8 products outsell LaFemme products by a considerable ratio at Rendo. That said, I think that Rendo is on the right track with creating their own base figure, as it's unwise to have a product that is dependent upon an outside manufacturer. Now the question is whether Rendo will play it smart and continue to keep the LF products running across multiple generations of Poser. I've always believed that one of the biggest mistakes that Poser made was in replacing their base figures with every new release of the software, as the fact that the Victoria products continued to accrue assets and features over multiple Poser iterations inevitably lead to their domination of the market. I remember that at the time of the transition from Poser 5 to Poser 6, the number of PAs who were creating add ons for James, Jessie, and Miki was actually quite repectable, but with each new generation of Poser figure after that, the number of PAs interested in making dedicated products decreased as it became obvious that they were essentially throwaways that were destined to be replaced and forgotten fairly quickly.
Not so much a mistake as a total lack of interest on the part of Smith Micro
If you look at the Rendo's what's hot then you can see that DS products outsell the Poser ones whenever something (typically an environment, or prop set) is sold in both versions. However, as you said, it is the figure stuff that drives their income, and that comes mostly from G8, not LF or another figure.
I find it somewhat ironic that Daz Studio (and Genesis) was initially developed largely from money Poser users were paying Daz for Poser compatible products. Now it is the other way round, where DS users, buying DS stuff from Rendo, are providing the bulk of the funding for the further development of Poser.
Not a total lack. A total lack would have lead to the continued re-use of one of the existing figure generations. Which, ironically, would have probably worked better than the constant game of musical chairs. The sad thing is that at one point I thought that Smith Micro had finally wised up when the boxes started featuring images of Blackhearted's Anatasia, which was Blackhearted's outstanding upgrade of the Poser 9 Alyson 2 figure, and then began offering Anastasia and Tyler, based on Ryan 2, with purchase. Given that A2 and A2 were basically weight-mapped versions of the Poser 8 figures, it seems like they'd finally settled on something... and instead SM promptly went and replaced them on the next Poser release with what were arguably the worst pair of figures they ever made, Rex and Roxy. Ugh...
Sure, but it gives you an idea of the general interest I think.
Also a different type of content, hardly any sexy stuff. If you google sketchup images practically everything is architecture. Try google daz3d and see what you get...
I've heard that too, but isn't that just for the first couple of months? Back catalogs are the key for earning a decent living I've heard. Don Albert revealed his monthly income a while ago and I was pretty surprised by the numbers ($700+ /month AFAIR) considering 98% of his stuff is pretty old (SKU < 20.000).
I personally think most DAZ customers don't venture off the DAZ site with regards to 3D, but I think they must have 25K regular customers now.
Er, the fundemental flaw with that premise is that if most DAZ customers didn't venture off this site, how could Renderosity consistantly be selling more DAZ-centric products than anything else, especially given that the bestselling G8 and G8.1 products can't be used without using DAZ Studio at some point? The same anology also applies to most of the smaller independent stores and Renderotica, for that matter, though that last one is an admittedly much more, um... focused sub market.
Now, if one frames things in the context that perhaps most new users spend most of their time at DAZ, that becomes a more viable premise, but I don't think a newbie has to here very long before they start to realize that the DAZ store is woefully lacking in a lot of the most basic necessities required for doing more than rendering images of pretty girls. And that ultimately means that the serious enthusiasts, who are ultimately the ones who spend the most money, are almost certainly spending a good portion of their time off site, even if they are still spending a lot of money here.
SketchUp wasn't mentioned as a direct comparison to DAZ's product mix, but as a relative example of how having a large number of registered users can have little relationship to how viable a product site may actually be.
30 million SketchUp users probably mostly reflects the number of users of the free version.
A huge portion of those free users were engaged in a project Google was using for Google Earth maps...
From what I understand, the biggest reason why Google purchased SketchUp was to allow users to create simple geolocated 3D models of actual structures for Google Earth... they gave away a free version to encourage users to create models to populate the 3D cities for the 3D maps.
Basically they were doing the work of 3D mapping cities for Google for free, and Google allowed people to use SketchUp Free for non commercial use to encourage more users to join the effort.
SketchUp Professional helped pay the basic bills allowing the project to continue.
Its why SketchUp Free had only KMZ, SKP and DAE as export formats... .kmz is a form of .xlm that's good at expressing geographic information for internet based maps... users of the free version could make simple models of real world structures, and submit the models for inclusion in Google Earth maps... SketchUp was chosen for this endeavor because of its simplicity to learn and use and because it had a very easy way of projecting photo based images onto surfaces, which allowed people to take low resolution pictures of buildings and texture the simple models in one click of the paint bucket (honestly, it's usually slightly more involved, but it can often be that simple)...
Google was continually criticized for not doing much to improve the software or fix simple bugs and over the years users made hundreds of (mostly) free plug-ins that added tools and functionality that Google didn't cost them anything to develop... this preexisting, mostly free library of tools and plugins made SketchUp a valuable asset that cost Google very little overhead to gain, so by the time they were done with it, it had acquired a large worldwide user base of professional architects and engineers... it served its purpose at very little cost to Google, the users who purchased the Professional version probably covered most of the cost of software upkeep/ maintenance and website maintenance, with some level of profit... but overall it was meant more as a tool for Google, than a product to sell... and ultimately they sold it for a decent sum (probably around 90 million dollars... they paid around 45 million to purchase it from @Last Software in 2006)
Unless I was misinformed, their original purchase of SketchUp had less to do with selling a product than using that product to help them achieve a goal... which again, unless I'm mistaken, was why they eventually sold SketchUp to Trimble when better tools became available to allow them to achieve their goal quicker and more effectively...
I'm not trying to correct anyone, but it was actually an interesting business model or way to approach a project... sadly though, considering how many talented people contributed to enhancing the value of SketchUp, it would have been nice if Google had done something different with the software as Trimble has a completely different business model and its now subscription only and the free version is online only and extremely limited with no plugins.
Just running around the net for freebies...
This probably doesn't help much for your stats, but I've been making free assets for DS for a few years and for Poser before that and I get at least three times the downloads with my DS stuff than I ever did with my Poser stuff. You can take that as you will. LOL
Laurie
Just this week I saw Josh Crockett's The Count on the label of a Halloween candle ;).