Amiga community Size

[Hooligan_DCS]

>by Wayne on 2004/1/3 20:08:33

>If the daily activity of this site is to be taken into consideration, my best guess would be about 100 or so people left.


There are several dozen active Amiga users in Finland itself... I wonder how many drinks you had when you came up with this number :-)

[MarkTime]

of course the viable platform argument was lost a long time ago...probably around 1996 the platform lost viability and sustainability.

However, we have bottomed out and I believe the community is at a new sustainable level.

if you count all users... the germans and the english speaking world...the 10 people who use aros ;-), AmigaOne owners, Pegasos I owners, uae, Classic Line, and people like me who just post for apparantly no reason..(because we don't own any Amiga, don't use an emulator, don't use aros, and have even lost any sense of being uncomfortable about it)..  I think that number is closer to 3000.  I don't know that that number is important as its too diverse a group to reach with a product.

I do think an Amiga OS 4 or the Pegasos II, can be a viable product, however.  It's just that they will have to attract new users.  There are lots of people interested in new OS's and new fun computer systems.

[cgutjahr]

Would be interesting if all the major sites would make their statistics available online, like this:

amiga-news.de stats

[MarkTime]

wow, did I say 3000 users, I meant 6000 users ;-)

impressive stats, and they aren't the busiest amiga site...

[Kronos]

MarkTime wrote:
impressive stats, and they aren't the busiest amiga site...

Probraly just as busy as a.org  ....

[Cyberus]

reflect wrote:
That was probably the most daft thing I've ever seen you say, ever, Wayne.

Geez, give the guy a break. You should take what people say with a pinch of salt sometimes. Perhaps he wasn't being 100% serious!

[Wolfe]

I use my Amiga regularly but never to surf the web.  I have used it to do some downloading from Aminet but anymore I don't even do that.  Amiga browsers suck.

Mostly I use Safari and OS X for the net, but also Linux and Mozilla.

Can't wait for the MicroA1 and OS 4  :-D  , but its going to need AmiZilla to survive unless iBrowse does a miraculous transformation. . . . . .  :-o

[chris]

Looking at those stats, and the article views on amiga.org and amigaworld.net - the OS4 pre-release CD annoucement got around 7000 views combined - the first OS4 screenshots attracted 50000 unique visitors, sales of AmigaOne and Pegasos combined must be around 2000, and there must be countless numbers of people still using old Amigas who are not visibly active, or have a PPC upgraded Amiga and will upgrade to OS4.  None of these figures are particulary accurate or indicative, and the only important community size figure is probably the installed OS4 userbase (which is currently 0, sans beta-testers).  If I had to guess real community size, I would say 10000.  If I had to guess installed OS4 userbase just after OS4 final release, then probably 3000.  These are my opinions, nobody else's  ;-)

Incidentally, this graph (on the right) may be of interest, it shows web-interest in the Amiga peaking in 1999, and tailing off ever since (now hovering at ~10% of that peak).  One of those links shows a search category for AmigaOS 5.0  :-)

Chris

[locutus]

I agree on the browser part, using google and aminet is about it you want to do with a Amiga browser :-( .

[Paul_Gadd]

No one knows the size of the user base but you just have to take away the "we will buy anything Amiga" die hards and port beggers/petition idiots to see what sort of bad shape the Amiga market is in.

[bhoggett]

They do Amiga hardware, tough i have to admit i dont know how much of their cash income is from Amiga stuff.

Yet that is exactly my point. For the argument that the platform provides enough of a market to sustain businesses to be true then they must get their income from the Amiga market only. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself if all the people involved rely on the Amiga business for their living, or whether it's just a part-time business-cum-hobby.

In most cases the Amiga market does NOT provide a sustainable level alone, but the businesses involved are either doing it on a part-time basis or else subsidising their Amiga involvement from somewhere else.

Take E3B for instance. You work it out how many of their cards they'd need to sell to break even and cover Michael's living expenses for a year, not to mention the R&D and production costs. Now work it out if you think he's actually sold that many cards...

See?

[Abou27]

I remember reading an article in the New York Times in 1999 in which they estimated the size of the Amiga community at 500,000.  Obviously, there was no indication given of how they had arrived at this figure (someone's head seems like a probable source), but I recall being shocked at how low it was - in hindsight, I was no doubt being very naive.  As was pointed out at start of thread, it all depends on how one defines an "Amiga User".  However, considering that there were over 5 million Amigas sold in the UK alone, you would only need 0.2% of these to still use their Amigas to reach a figure of 10,000.  I admit that this is probably way over the top but I reckon that there must surely be over 20,000 people worldwide who still use their Amigas on occasion - admittedley not as their primary computers - but, nevertheless, use.

Also, for this site to regularly attract 30 new members a week suggests that there may be a larger active Amiga community than one might at first think.

[bhoggett]

ROTFL!!!

500,000 in 1999? More like 50,000 and I'd regard that as optimistic.

I doubt there are still 20,000 active Amiga users left. Even 10,000 is highly optimistic and unlikely to represent the actual market, which IMHo is no more than 2,000-3,000 at best.

Like I said earlier though, those 2-3k systems will be sold very quickly, and then what?

[Rodney]

I'd have to say less than 10,000 that actualy use their Amiga's as their main computer, infact, its prolly less than 8 or 6 thousand. But there are plenty more that turn their Amiga's on for a game or a pain programe that they enjoy.

And then theres even more that have Amiga's but dont use them, such as myself. I've only got an A500. But i'd say theres prolly less than 5000 people who are willing to upgrade or purchase an A1. That'll increase as OS4 goes through its revisions, but we're gunna have to get cheaper hardware. I know that may not be too possible atm unless the pegasos can get a an A1 licence, but that may never happen.

[TjLaZer]

Actually I would like it if this site was able to work 100% with an Amiga browser!!  It doesn't.  Like to upload a avatar or do some changes I need to use IE 6  I use IBrowse 2.3 on my Amigas.

[Argo]

Do they visit AO regularly?