I just found some numbers that surprised me more than a little.

A while back, when FlightSim revamped their website, I wondered if that would put off others as it did me, and whether it would affect their traffic and download numbers. I thought I'd compare the downloads of the same airplane from the "big three" sites and see what I might find. I didn't expect anything definitive because I'd never compared such figures before FlightSim made their changes and I wasn't curious enough to go digging through libraries to find older figures. And I didn't compare numbers for the B-45 because the need to learn the procedures for the new FlightSim and for SimV, which I hadn't used before, and prepare the required "packaging", I didn't put the B-45 up at all the sites on the same day. The reworked T4M went up everywhere at the same time so I used it for my comparison.

I expected that the "big three" would get about the same number of downloads, maybe a little less from SimV. And I figured a lot less from here since we're sort of a "niche" site with a presumably lower traffic volume. So this morning I looked at the download numbers for the T4M at the "big three" and here. This is what I found:

AvSim: 44 FlightSim: 28 SimV: 98 SOH: 64

I was amazed to see that SimV had more than twice what AvSim had and more than three times what FlightSim had. And SOH beat both AvSim and FlightSim.

So... are we and SimV the "big two?" Or have we bumped FlightSim out of the "big three?"

Of course I have no idea whether this proportional distribution has anything to do with the changes at FlightSim. Maybe they were always this far behind AvSim and we just didn't know it.

I wonder how much of this is due to the test file being an FS9 airplane. There are a lot of us old fogies here who are still mired in the past with a twenty year old sim. Would the outcome be different if the test subject was a plane for a more modern sim and presumably a younger and more numerous user base?

I wonder, but I'm not curious or motivated enough to do the research so maybe we'll never know.