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[fuzion_mixer]

Around 1 May to 1 June 2014, the downfall of visits to TMA dropped drastically: from 15597 to 1090. What happened to the number? Is the demoscene really falling apart, within the new and dominant formats of music (such as MP3, FLAC etc.)? I'd hate to see the community dwindle further....

*Note that this statistics are referred from ClustrMaps*

[fuzion_mixer]

From the original 79197 visits to 17592 over the course of 3 months (3 Jan to 1 April) is apparent too.

[fuzion_mixer]

*3 Jan to 1 April 2008. If you don't know how to get the ClustrMaps statistics, here: http://www.clustrmaps.com/map/Modarchive.org. Go to 'Archives', then 'Archives (v1.0)'. You should see all the dates there. Tell me what you think is the cause. All thoughts are appreciated.

[ModTomIT]

Somehow I doubt that a  drop like that could happen. I would imagine it has to do with changes in how that service collects information. There could have been a massive schism in the scene and I wasn't aware of it though...I don't follow scene stuff except to listen to the delicious modules posted here.

[Saga Musix]

It can be a change in algorithms, bot visitors or whatever. The influx of new modules and legit accounts has been relatively constant over the last few years, from what I can tell. A suddeny decrease from month to another is certainly not a sign of thousands of people suddenly not being interested anymore.
Besides, ClusterMaps is no longer embedded in our site as far as I can see, so that might coincide with the lack of visitors in the stats.

[fuzion_mixer]

@ModTomIT - What kind of information do you mean, exactly?

And Point 2....it could be true. I mean, it could affect a large number of the people in the community (at that time), maybe that's the cause of the fate of Breakpoint?

By the way, I second you on that last sentence.

@Saga Musix - Well, it could be that, too. This website must've gone through a lot of 'security enforcements' due to spammers, AdBots and such.

I've not been here since the start of TMA (let alone a decade), so I wouldn't know the number of people actually uploading modules back then.

Back to Point 1. If the number of people visited TMA had been constant, does that mean that only a few hundred people (out of the 70 thousand) is actually in the demoscene? I mean, if that's the case, then surely some people would disappear from it, because of its dying popularity.

And uhh....I know that ClustrMaps isn't embedded in the site anymore, but maybe it got its statistics from the lite TMA (because I went in, and it's still there), which is from the same server(?), and thus can still record down visits to this site. It's still counting.....

[Saga Musix]

does that mean that only a few hundred people (out of the 70 thousand) is actually in the demoscene?

No. But again: Don't trust random numbers you get from a random internet service provider. We have actual download statistics, they don't. And if these statistics tell anything, then it's that the weekly number of module downloads went up, not down.

And uhh....I know that ClustrMaps isn't embedded in the site anymore, but maybe it got its statistics from the lite TMA (because I went in, and it's still there), which is from the same server(?), and thus can still record down visits to this site. It's still counting.....

Ah right, it's still on ModArchive Lite. In which case the sudden decrease can for example be explained by Google using more effective website de-duplication measures so that more hits land on the actual modarchive.org site rather than lite.modarchive.org.
And, as already said, it could be ClustrMap's (not our's) increased measures against counting spam bots and search engines as real visitors. Nobody knows how they do their hit counts so you have no possibility to reason about their numbers.

Again: Don't try to read anything into the numbers from ClustrMaps. They are just numbers whose meaning is unknown to outsiders.

There is / was certainly a decline in interest in the module scene over a very long run, but that was over a decade and not over the course of a single month. Whether we will see a large increase in activity again thanks to retro scenes will be left to see.