The watching 'vBulletin's market share nosedive' thread.

Paul M · Mar 10, 2019

Getting back to the original subject, I see VB is now 10.5 % behind XF.

In fact, its close to being overtaken by Invision now as well.

Also, even 6+ years after vB5 was released, its barely on 5.1%, most vB sites are still on vB3 or vB4.

HallofFamer · Mar 11, 2019

VB5 is the world's leading forum software, something isnt right about this stats.

LeadCrow · Mar 11, 2019

I'm most intrigued by the drastic overnight increase of nginx's marketshare, if its not an error (large webhosts and containers switching to google cloud?).
Unless I'm mistaken nginx support was natively added to vb5 so this ecosystem shift might accelerate the demise of vb3 and vb4.

Digitalpoint · Mar 11, 2019

LeadCrow said:
I'm most intrigued by the drastic overnight increase of nginx's marketshare, if its not an error (large webhosts and containers switching to google cloud?).
Unless I'm mistaken nginx support was natively added to vb5 so this ecosystem shift might accelerate the demise of vb3 and vb4.

Seems weird to me too. But I also haven’t cared enough to really go digging to see what the change was.

R0binHood · Mar 12, 2019

Over 1/3 of all XF sites are on 2.x now by the looks of it

And over 50% PHP 7.x adoption.

Steve · Mar 12, 2019

You will likely see a transition to 2.1 the more stable it becomes and with XF 1.x being EOL by the end of this year.

rudedog · May 12, 2019

Looks like vB will fall behind Invision soon

Xenforo - 40.2%
vBulletin - 25.8%
Invision - 24.5%
Burning Board - 9.4%

MagicalAzareal · May 12, 2019

XenForo, IPB, SMF, MyBB, etc.'s market-share are also nose-diving.
The only one that is going up is Discourse but it's nowhere near enough to prop up the market with how fast it is shrinking.

Losing a fifth of your sites in a year is not a "victory", it's merely fighting to become the captain of a sinking ship. vB is only taking the brunt of it because it's the most popular, therefore it has the most sites to burn into oblivion.

What you are seeing is the death of the forum market.

Digitalpoint · May 13, 2019

MagicalAzareal said:
XenForo, IPB, SMF, MyBB, etc.'s market-share are also nose-diving.
The only one that is going up is Discourse but it's nowhere near enough to prop up the market with how fast it is shrinking.

Losing a fifth of your sites in a year is not a "victory", it's merely fighting to become the captain of a sinking ship. vB is only taking the brunt of it because it's the most popular, therefore it has the most sites to burn into oblivion.

What you are seeing is the death of the forum market.

Not sure where you are getting your numbers, but...

vBulletin is not the most popular unless you are living 10 years ago, and I don't think Discourse is as popular as you think. Discourse would have to more than double it's install base while Burning Board didn't gain a single install for it to even have as many installs Burning Board (which isn't a very big install base in itself).

overcast · May 13, 2019

I wonder how much spectrum forum which github recently purchased has managed to get some people to create community on their platform. Also I wonder how many people are using something like Flarum?

haqzore · May 13, 2019

Digitalpoint said:
Not sure where you are getting your numbers, but...

vBulletin is not the most popular unless you are living 10 years ago, and I don't think Discourse is as popular as you think. Discourse would have to more than double it's install base while Burning Board didn't gain a single install for it to even have as many installs Burning Board (which isn't a very big install base in itself).

View attachment 52867

While he did say "shares", I took his comment more as one of # of installs. Like:

All forum script installs: 1 million. VB: 100k of those.
As forums decline today, VB has vastly more raw #'s to lose.
So if today all forum script installs are down to 900k.
ALL scripts are losing (VB/XF/Invision). But, VB loses more than others, due to their larger foundation.

Not sure I agree, but would be curious to see rounded #'s rather than %'s.

MagicalAzareal · May 13, 2019

Digitalpoint said:
Not sure where you are getting your numbers, but...

vBulletin is not the most popular unless you are living 10 years ago, and I don't think Discourse is as popular as you think. Discourse would have to more than double it's install base while Burning Board didn't gain a single install for it to even have as many installs Burning Board (which isn't a very big install base in itself).

View attachment 52867

Wappalyzer, W3Tech and a few other statistics sites show that every software, except for Discourse are being absolutely punished in the number of raw sites they're losing.
Also, the big three are apparently Discuz! (China's vBulletin), bbPress and vB, if we're talking market-share, which doesn't really matter in today's age.

haqzore said:
While he did say "shares", I took his comment more as one of # of installs. Like:

All forum script installs: 1 million. VB: 100k of those.

As forums decline today, VB has vastly more raw #'s to lose.

So if today all forum script installs are down to 900k.

ALL scripts are losing (VB/XF/Invision). But, VB loses more than others, due to their larger foundation.

Not sure I agree, but would be curious to see rounded #'s rather than %'s.

There is also the factor of vB being a more dated software, however a lot of these sites are shutting down outright rather than converting to XF / IPB, so it shrinking doesn't benefit anyone but Facebook / Discord.

Due to vB, forums used to permeate every corner of the web and as those sites go down, the forum market has shrunk a loooot, so I wouldn't be smug about vB nosediving.

mysiteguy · May 13, 2019

Where does Wappalyer and W3Tech show the absolute number of installs? From what I've seen, they've always shown percentages of all web sites installed, not absolute numbers

LeadCrow · May 14, 2019

MagicalAzareal said:
Wappalyzer, W3Tech and a few other statistics sites show that every software, except for Discourse are being absolutely punished in the number of raw sites they're losing.

It might not be as clearcut as it looks. A forum running paid software is likely to migrate to another paid script - one's loss being another's gain, without expanding the market.

That said, It'd help for the % to be mapped to an actual number for at least the total boards detected running a commercial script. The only reason we're speculating is because it's unclear wether the market is actually expanding, contracting or stable (compared to vb's data for lifetime sales and vbcloud marketshare). The respective forumware providers are already aware of how many licences sold and licenced sites are online anyway.

MagicalAzareal · May 14, 2019

mysiteguy said:
Where does Wappalyer and W3Tech show the absolute number of installs? From what I've seen, they've always shown percentages of all web sites installed, not absolute numbers

vB = XenForo times 4 (I believe). Used to be somewhere in the millions in 2015, if I recall.

Discuz! = XenForo times 3.

bbPress - Over 100k sites.

XenForo - Over 100k sites.

MyBB - Over 10k sites.

Discourse - 80% of MyBB.

FluxBB - Over 1k sites.

Off the top of my head.

I looked at a few sites a year ago (too many pages in my web history to quickly find them), which also incidentally said that the #1 phpBB forum is a porn site, those people must be very passionate about that stuff lol

LeadCrow said:
That said, It'd help for the % to be mapped to an actual number for at least the total boards detected running a commercial script.

Precise numbers would be great.

mysiteguy · May 14, 2019

MagicalAzareal said:
vB = XenForo times 4 (I believe). Used to be somewhere in the millions in 2015, if I recall.

Discuz! = XenForo times 3.

bbPress - Over 100k sites.

XenForo - Over 100k sites.

MyBB - Over 10k sites.

Discourse - 80% of MyBB.

FluxBB - Over 1k sites.

Off the top of my head.

I looked at a few sites a year ago (too many pages in my web history to quickly find them), which also incidentally said that the #1 phpBB forum is a porn site, those people must be very passionate about that stuff lol

Precise numbers would be great.

I think you're seriously overestimating the number of forums then. Millions of VBulletin installations would have put its market in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Builtwith shows 19,714 current VBulletin forums. Assuming when you say millions its on the low end (we'll use 2 million), that would amount to a loss of 99.1253% of VBulletin sites.

Xenforo's overall market size has been increasing since they launched. They've gone from 0 to 14,187 forums.

Builtwith, in 2015, showed the following data:

ProBoards - 3.8 million
InvisionFree: 2.7 million
ZetaBoards: 120,000
Discuz - 160,000
vBulletin – 44,540
phpBB – 27,073
SMF – 25,811
Forumotion – 14,459
XenForo – 8,781
Vanilla 2,154
Discourse – 697

MagicalAzareal · May 14, 2019

I cannot attest for their accuracy as I did not personally write the tools, but quite a few seem to be reaching towards that consensus, so there must be some kernel of truth.

Of course, any measurements of the "entire web" are bound to run into issues.

Also, if I recall, "Builtwith", last I checked it, put software with known high numbers of sites into the double digits. I am not sure it is accurate. And Proboards / Invisionfree are easier to crawl as they're both on single domains, if I recall, rather than spread out across the web.

MagicalAzareal · May 14, 2019

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/
The first site which comes to mind for these things is W3Tech as they have a fairly long reputation of tracking these things, although they don't give you precise numbers.

Luckily, we know how many sites Wordpress has, so we can calculate backwards off that.

Wordpress has 75 million sites and 33% of all sites.
vBulletin has x sites and 0.1% of all sites.

Let's start by dividing 75 million by 33. That's about 2.2 million per percent.
Divide that by ten and that's 220k sites.

These statistics sites tend to give varying results however, perhaps some crawlers can't find all the sites while others can find other pockets of sites. And they don't need to have millions of paying customers, if you know what I mean, although who knows, I just follow whatever statistics seem reliable.

Edit: I give up on calculating. My brain is half-asleep. Anyway. I think that methodology could get some results. I'm going to bed, good night.

zappaDPJ · May 14, 2019

The figures I've seen vary so wildly they are not worth quoting. It's one reason I like Digital Point's cookie search because it shows trends.

The only figure I've ever heard that had any credibility came from Internet Brands who claimed over 120,000 vBulletin licences sold. That was well over five years ago.

LeadCrow · May 15, 2019

Builtwith has a section that details its numbers in a bit more detail corroborating the general trends shown on tracking sites.

Here's vbulletin's page.. Most notably, it gives a numerical value on how many sites migrate to or away from vb, and from/to wich software. Unsurprisingly its loss is xf's greatest gain...

The watching 'vBulletin's market share nosedive' thread.

When will vB drop below 50% market share?

Within 6 months

Within 1 year

Within 18 months

Within 2 years

Within 30 months

Within 3 years

Longer than 3 years

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