2009, a transition year for VideoLAN
As I was saying in my presentation at the VideoLAN Dev Days 2009, 2009 was an important year for VideoLAN:
- VideoLAN has become an non-profit organization
- VideoLAN Dev Days (end of ‘08) helped to structure and take decisions
- VLC 1.0.0 was tagged and released
- DVBlast and VLMC were started
- Acceleration of development, and communication around VLC and VideoLAN
- Lots of ideas for the future were discussed.
Statistics and Website
One of the question we have the most is: How many users VLC has?
.
The answer is quite difficult to get, and we’ll rediscuss about it later.
However, there are trends that are easy to measure, and Google Trends is not the only option here. 
videolan.org
One of the important way to measure the VLC popularity is to check the audience of videolan.org Website and its increase.
videolan.org numbers for 2009
In 2009:
- VideoLAN has seen over 90 million visits on its website,
- from 68million different IPs.
- Pages view are around 480million pages.
- Best month was december, with 9,25 million visits.
- 0 advertisement.
- and is hosted on a single machine
Compared to 2008, this is an increase of 50%, since we had 60 million visits in 2008!
Operating Systems changes
Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:
- Windows: 79,3% (from 81,4%)
- Windows 7: 17%
- Windows Vista: 16.6% (from 21%)
- Windows XP: 43,6% (from 57,2%)
- Windows 2000: 0,5% (from 1.1%)
- Windows 9x/Me: 0.3% (from 0.8%)
- Mac OS X: 12,4% (from 10.8%)
- Linux: 4.1% from 5.2%
And the rest…
Conclusion: nothing surprising here, and we see that 7 is already ahead of Vista… We were right to drop Win9x support :D
Browsers changes
Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:
- Firefox: 42,8% (from 45,3%)
- Internet Explorer: 33,9% (from 39%)
- IE6: 7.8% (from 14%)
- IE7: 7.8% (from 23,4%)
- IE8: 17.7% (from 0.7%)
- Safari: 8.3% (from 8.9%)
- Opera: 3.1% (from 3.2%)
- Chrome: 6.5% (from 0.7%)
Conclusion: well, here, seeing Firefox loosing 3% in one year (in fact 2% in December alone) seemed weird, while Google Chrome is quite strong. I can’t say I am much surprised though.