A year ago I've published an article called The Popularity of Perl in 2013

It contained a list of sites with their Alexa ranking and a few site with information from their Google Analytics.

This is an updated version of that report.

The Popularity of Perl

There are many ways to measure the popularity of a programming language. We are going to look at 3 measurements here:

Perl Weekly

The Perl Weekly website itself does not get a lot of visitors. What is interesting there is the number of subscribers. It grew from 4156 on 1 January 2013 to 5103 on 31 December 2013 and to 5645. on 31 December 2014. It's Google+ page was circled by 4,066 people on 1 January 2014 and 4,874 on 1 January 2015. (I don't seem to have the number from the beginning og 2013.)

These numbers are, of course, more indicative to the popularity of the Perl Weekly, than that of Perl.

Alexa

The Alexa rankings provide a proximate ranking of web sites. It has big and strange fluctuations, but lacking more exact data, it can be a good indicator for the relative popularity of web sites.

Ordered according to their position on 1 Jan 2015.

Perl

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provide a much more accurate measurements of number of visitors and page-views. I have access to the data of several major, and a few smaller Perl-related sites.

Number of pageviews

Site December 2013 December 2014 Annual change CPAN total 2,183,610 1,940,160 -11.2% search.cpan.org 1,758,977 1,363,260 -22.5% metacpan.org 424,633 576,900 35.8% perlmaven.com 116,574 250,970 115.0% blogs.perl.org 59,524 72,465 22.0% strawberryperl.com 40,606 40,547 0.0% padre.perlide.org 27,585 27,705 0.0% dwimperl.com 10,942 10,221 -6.6% perldancer.org 9,916 9,172 0.0% advent.perldancer.org 6,667 9,938 50.0% perl6maven.com 1,561 3,983 155.0%

Number of sessions

Site December 2013 December 2014 Annual change CPAN total 837,856 771,615 -7.9% search.cpan.org 700,382 597,417 -14.8% metacpan.org 137,474 174,198 27.0% perlmaven.com 84,810 184,000 116.0% blogs.perl.org 44,195 52,012 18.2% strawberryperl.com 31,690 31,329 0.0% padre.perlide.org 10,333 11,360 9.7% dwimperl.com 7,813 7,368 -6.5% perldancer.org 5,214 5,388 0.0% advent.perldancer.org 3,568 4,421 25.7% perl6maven.com 846 1,445 70.0%

Number of users

Site December 2013 December 2014 Annual change CPAN total 485,503 449,333 -7.5% search.cpan.org 403,164 357,156 -11.5% metacpan.org 82,339 92,177 12.2% perlmaven.com 59,728 117,082 98.3% blogs.perl.org 31,859 36,494 14.1% strawberryperl.com 27,337 26,408 -3.3% padre.perlide.org 8,531 9,559 11.7% dwimperl.com 6,638 6,784 1.5% perldancer.org 4,027 4,074 0.0% advent.perldancer.org 2,138 2,180 0.0% perl6maven.com 680 1,169 72.0%

CPAN total is metacpan.org+search.cpan.org

Data from perl.org and perl.com

I don't have access to the Google Analytics of the other perl.org sites, but I got some data from Ask Bjørn Hansen, one of the owners and admins of perl.org. (Beginning of February 2014).

perldoc.perl.org has about a million page views a month over ~500k visits.

perl.org 130k visits.

perl.com 70k visits.

The rest of the sites have less than 50k visitors a month.

At a glance then except for learn.perl.org traffic has been pretty much flat for 4-5 years.

learn.perl.org has been growing from ~12k/month to 40k visits a month over the last 4 years, though likely that's related to the redesign a few years ago.

See also relative popularity of programming languages in 2014.