If you visit more than one furry art site, it's pretty easy to see
that some of them are more popular than others. Furbitron attempts to
quantify this, by looking at the number of submissions over time for
several art sites.
How Furbitron works
Once every 24 hours, Furbitron looks at the latest submissions on
each art site it supports. If the art site provides an API, Furbitron
uses that. If not, Furbitron fetches the main page of the art site
and parses data out of the HTML.
Furbitron records the submission ID and the date and time of the latest submissions. Once the data is collected, Furbitron generates updated graphs and statistics for each art site.
Data from before Furbitron started actively monitoring an art site is from querying the art site's API for a particular series of dates, or from looking up a series of past submissions and parsing data out of the HTML, or (for e621 and Furbooru) from a database dump provided by the art site.
Data from Furbitron's active monitoring, starting for many sites in late September, 2021, is shown on the graphs as "live". Data from before that time was mostly collected in mid-September, 2021, and is shown on the graphs as "history".
Note: Furbitron doesn't currently have any way to account
for deleted submissions. For example, some artists will post a new
submission with a "now streaming" image when they are about to stream,
and then delete the submission when they're done streaming. Or, an
artist might post new submissions for a work in progress, and then
delete them after they post the finished work. These drive up the
submission IDs, but they don't mean that the art site actually has
that many submissions on it.
Questions and Answers
Why doesn't Furbitron
support a certain art site?
There are already analytics packages for "big" platforms like Twitter.
Also, finding just the furry art on all of Twitter, or another
big platform, is a non-trivial problem.
Furbitron will not support InkBunny.
If there's an art site you think Furbitron should monitor, feel
free to suggest it.
Can art sites game Furbitron's
monitoring?
Yes, although they probably won't.
An art site could just not use certain submission numbers - for example, if it assigned only even numbers to new submissions, it would instantly appear to Furbitron to have twice as many submissions as it actually does.
If someone posts a large number of new submissions to an art site,
and then immediately deletes them, it will still increase the
submission count seen by Furbitron.
I work for or volunteer for
one of the art sites Furbitron monitors. How do I stop or change
Furbitron's monitoring?
Send Furbitron a note, private message, or direct message from your
owner, staff, moderator, or administrator account on the art site.
Furbitron has a user account on all of the art sites it monitors - see
Furbitron's contact page for a list.
You can also send email - see Furbitron's
contact page - but requests that come in via
email will be deferred until Furbitron also gets a message on the art
site. (Email is easy to fake.)
How accurate are
Furbitron's numbers?
This is difficult to answer for Buzzly, FurAffinity, FurryNetwork,
Itaku, and Weasyl; those five sites do not publish their idea of how
many submissions the site currently has.
FurryNetwork and Weasyl do not use the same submission ID sequence for all types of submissions, which may cause Furbitron to slightly under-estimate the total number of submissions on those two sites.
Buzzly does not use numeric submission IDs, so Furbitron cannot check the latest submissions to get the highest submission ID. Instead, Furbitron queries Buzzly's API to get the count of submissions Buzzly claims to have had since Furbitron's last query, and adds that count to a running total.
Furbooru publishes the number of submissions they claim to have on their statistics page. As of early June, 2025, they claimed approximately 439,000 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 451,360. This implies that about 97.3% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on Furbooru by about 2.8%.
Furiffic published an approximate number of submissions they claimed to have at the end of the "Latest submissions" bar on their front page. As of early November, 2021, they claimed approximately 124,810 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 205,000. This implies that only about 60.9% of the possible submission IDs were actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimated the number of submissions on Furiffic by about 64%.
FurryNetwork uses four separate submission ID sequences: artwork, photos, writing, and multimedia. (Most of the other sites Furbitron monitors use only one submission ID sequence for all types of submissions.) Furbitron only monitors the artwork submissions on FurryNetwork. As of late January, 2025, artwork submission IDs made up about 92.8% of the total submission IDs on FurryNetwork. In other words, Furbitron may under-estimate the total number of submissions on FurryNetwork by about 7.8%.
SoFurry publishes the number of submissions they claim to have at the bottom right corner of their front page. As of late January, 2025, they claimed approximately 1,387,380 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 2,219,950. This implies that only about 62.5% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on SoFurry by about 60%.
Weasyl uses two separate submission ID sequences: artwork and characters. (Most of the other sites Furbitron monitors use only one submission ID sequence for all types of submissions.) Furbitron only monitors the artwork submissions on Weasyl. As of late January, 2025, artwork submission IDs made up about 96.6% of the total submission IDs on Weasyl. In other words, Furbitron may under-estimate the total number of submissions on Weasyl by about 3.5%.
e621 publishes the number of submissions they claim to have at the bottom of their front page. As of late January, 2025, they claimed approximately 4,648,670 submissions, and the latest submission ID seen by Furbitron was about 5,333,340. This implies that only about 87.2% of the possible submission IDs are actually used. In other words, Furbitron probably over-estimates the number of submissions on e621 by about 15%.
e621 also publishes a dump of their database every day. As of late January, 2025, the database dump showed approximately 4,647,600 active submissions, and the latest submission ID in the dump was about 5,331,190. This implies that only about 87.2% of the possible submission IDs are actually used, which is comparable to the percentage found above.
In theory, it would be possible for Furbitron to request
every single submission ID on all of the sites it monitors,
and note how many of those correspond to valid submissions. This
has not been implemented, because it would take a long time for
some sites. If Furbitron requested one submission ID per second,
continuously, this would take about 3.6 days for Buzzly, up to
about 23 months (!) for FurAffinity.
Why does Furbitron look
terrible on my phone?
Furbitron is designed to look good on a reasonably-sized screen in
landscape. This includes some newer phones and tablets.
There are no plans to make Furbitron look good on small or portrait
screens.
Can I get the source code
for Furbitron?
No.
Can I get the data that
Furbitron collects?
Probably not. Asking is free, though.
e621 and Furbooru both publish a dump of their database every day;
links to the dump are available on each site.
Who owns Furbitron?
Furbitron is privately owned and operated by one person, who has been
in the fandom for a couple of decades now. That person is not
affiliated with any of the art sites Furbitron monitors, or any other
furry art site, in any paid or volunteer capacity.
Furbitron is privately funded by its owner.
Furbitron is not owned by or affiliated with any company that
does audience metrics for broadcast TV, satellite TV, cable TV,
broadcast radio, satellite radio, or web sites.
What user data does
Furbitron collect?
Furbitron does not use cookies.
Furbitron does not have advertising.
Furbitron does have web server logs, which include the IP addresses of all visitors. These are stored on the server, and normally not reviewed in detail, unless there is a problem. The web server logs are deleted after 30 days.
Furbitron is hosted in the United States, in the state of Illinois.
What software does
Furbitron use?
Server:
Apache on
Linux.
HTTPS: Let's Encrypt TLS certificate.
Markup: Based on the "Start Page Template" from w3schools. Uses w3.css.
Every day: Vixie cron, bash, perl, Firefox, and gnuplot.
Development, maintenance, and changes:
vim,
HTML Tidy,
wget,
lynx, and
micro_httpd.
Change log
2021-12-20
Changed stats script to correctly include 7, 31, and 365.25 days
of data in the past-week, past-month, and past-year measurement
periods. It had been using only 6, 30, and 364.25 days of data. The
all-time measurement period was already computed correctly.
Changed FurAffinity scraper to correctly deal with the times of recent submissions. FurAffinity, by default, apparently uses a fixed offset from UTC, which does not change with daylight savings time.
Removed the "Furiffic history" label from the "all except FA, past
month" graph, as there is now more than one month of live data
available for Furiffic.
2022-02-12
Added support for Buzzly.art. Shout out to
Deer Spangle,
who provided valuable insight into Buzzly's GraphQL API. This made
Buzzly support happen much more quickly than it otherwise would have.
2022-06-03
Removed live querying of Furiffic. Furiffic announced in March 2022
that they would shut down on 2022-06-01, and they did. Furbitron will
still display the last available data for Furiffic in the graphs and
statistics, but that data will no longer be updated.
2022-08-09
Added predictions for the dates of future submission ID milestones.
The predictions are computed daily, using a linear projection, and
are based on the past year of data for each site. The milestones are
manually selected.
The predictions for Buzzly will be somewhat optimistic for the next several months. The past year of data includes the time of very rapid growth at Buzzly in late 2021 and early 2022, but their growth rate has been lower since mid-March 2022.
Added notes on how Furbitron queries Buzzly and Weasyl.
2022-10-10
Added the Experiments section, for special projects based on
Furbitron's data. Most of the experiments will not automatically
update like the rest of Furbitron.
Removed the "history" label from most of the "past year" graphs, as there is now more than one year of live data available for most sites.
Moved the legend down on the "all except FA, past (week|month|year)" graphs, so it doesn't cover up as much of the data.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for some sites, since
they have already passed the initial milestones.
2022-12-08
Added data collection and statistics for e6AI, a new site operated
by the owners of e621. Full support for e6AI is forthcoming.
2023-01-15
Updated year-on-year graphs to include 2023 data for all sites.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity and
Weasyl, since both sites had passed their first milestone.
2023-02-14
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Buzzly, FurAffinity
and e6AI, since all three sites had passed their first milestone.
2023-05-17
Added the FA art comments experiment.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity, FurryNetwork, e621, and e6AI, since since all three sites had passed their first or second milestone. Changed the third submission ID milestone for Buzzly to a more realistic value.
Removed some "history" labels for the Buzzly, "all sites", and
"all except FA" past-year graphs, as there is now enough live data
available to cover the past year.
2023-08-21
Added support for Itaku. Once again, shout out to
Deer Spangle,
who found and shared the URL for Itaku's API.
Note: The line color on the graphs for Buzzly has changed! It is now brown, from Buzzly's logo, instead of yellow. This is because the graphs now use the yellow from Itaku's default theme for Itaku.
Added graphs for "all sites except FurAffinity and e621" to the "All except FA" pages. These graphs were requested via email by one of the e621 admins.
Removed Furiffic from the "all" and "all except FA" graphs for the past year, since it shut down more than a year ago.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity,
SoFurry, and e6AI, since since all three sites had passed their
first milestone.
2024-01-04
Updated year-on-year graphs to include 2024 data for all sites.
Removed some "history" labels for Itaku on the various past-week and past-month graphs, as there is now enough live data for Itaku available for those periods.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity, Itaku, e621, and e6AI, since all four sites had passed at least their first milestone.
Updated the information in the "How accurate are Furbitron's
numbers?" section on this page, and in the notes on the
FurryNetwork and Weasyl statistics, with data for January 2024.
2024-06-16
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Buzzly, FurAffinity,
Itaku, SoFurry, and e6AI, since all four sites had passed at least
their first milestone.
2024-07-31
Updated the e621 tag backlog experiment with data from late 2023
and the first half of 2024.
2024-08-07
Fixed a typo on the FA journals experiment page.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Weasyl and e6AI,
since both sites had passed their first milestone.
2024-11-04
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity, Itaku,
e621, and e6AI, since all four sites had passed at least their first
milestone.
2025-01-04
Updated year-on-year graphs to include 2025 data for all sites.
Removed some "history" labels for Itaku on the various past-year graphs, as there is now more than one year of live data for Itaku.
Changed the legend location on several graphs, in an attempt to cover up fewer of the traces.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity, Itaku, SoFurry, and e6AI, since all four sites had passed at least their first milestone.
Fixed a problem that prevented the FurryNetwork scraper from
working correctly over the past couple of days.
2025-01-27
Updated the information in the "How accurate are Furbitron's
numbers?" section on this page, and in the notes on the
FurryNetwork and Weasyl statistics, with data for January 2025.
2025-04-15
Changed the future submission ID milestones for FurAffinity, e621,
and e6AI, since all three sites had passed at least their first
milestone.
2025-05-01
Updated the information about submission ID sequences on the
FurryNetwork and Weasyl graph pages to match the updates made in
January 2025 to the statistics pages for those sites.
2025-05-08
Worked around a bug in the stats script that prevented it from
computing the FurAffinity stats due to the recent outage there. The
"last week" stats for FurAffinity will be zero until about
2025-05-15, when there will be a full week of data to work with once
again.
2025-05-20
Restored the previous stats script, so the "last week" stats for
FurAffinity will work correctly again.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Itaku, since it
had passed its first milestone.
2025-06-05
Added support for Furbooru, after a request from a Furbitron user.
Furbooru's line color on the graphs is purple, from its default
theme.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Buzzly and
FurAffinity, since both sites had passed their first milestone.
2025-06-24
Added Furbooru account to the contact page.
Changed the future submission ID milestones for Weasyl and e6AI, since both sites had passed their first milestone.