Emacs user base size

Question

I have for several years tried to get an estimate of the emacs user base.

Does anyone have good estimates besides the naive guess of the Linux/unix install base?

Answer 1

Getting hard numbers for this seems fairly difficult. Here's what I found:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/emacswiki.org/?metric=uv

Where it says in May 2010 there were about 13,000 unique visitors that month. Alexa

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/emacswiki.org

says that about .001% of all the Internet users visited emacswiki.org in the last month. Both sites put emacswiki.org in the top 150,000 sites on the web. It seems to me the number of times each version of emacs is downloaded could be discovered and might shed some more light on the topic.

I leave the transformation of these lies^H^H^H^Hstatistics into a number of users as an exercise for the reader.