TinyMCE November downloads surpasses 1 Million on NPM

During November 2021, TinyMCE NPM download numbers surpassed 1 million.

While the final count was 1,035,631, and that's an obvious milestone, it's the trend it indicates that's more important. Why is that? Because the NPM trend, which we wrote about in our previous NPM milestone post – 20 million downloads – tells the story of Tiny’s growth.

NPM numbers aren’t transparent

It's true. NPM downloads can be manipulated, and are easily misrepresented. We discussed both of  these points earlier this year: the numbers represent a count of HTTP 200 responses from servers and local environments.

In his blog, Andy Richardson highlighted one method of inflating download stats, and how they can be misleading:

"[...]downloads alone aren't a useful metric[...]I'm going to do a little more background research before trusting the downloads and popularity metrics on NPM 🕵️."
~ Andy Richardson, 17 March 2021

However, we still believe that NPM downloads are an indicator of adoption – especially when they’re considered as a trend, and when used alongside other information points and data to verify the volumes.

So what other data should be considered?

To save time, here's some more data points and insights into how TinyMCE has been performing lately, so you can arrive at your own decision:

• GitHub Stars – TinyMCE recently passed 10K stars on GitHub demonstrating that users really do want to save the GitHub repository.
• Stack Overflow activity – At the time of publishing this article, there’s 7,846 active questions tagged with [tinymce], with only 3,032 questions yet to be answered. So we have an active community with ongoing Q and A.
• Render speed increase – We released an upgrade to our editor rendering speed, with a 100ms faster init time. Improved loading speed is linked to better performance, where a delay of even one 1 second reduces customer satisfaction by 16% and we expect this to positively impact our rate of adoption.
• GitHub Forks – There are currently more than 1,900 forks of TinyMCE on GitHub, demonstrating that users are actively interested in copying and contributing to the project.

Why we know this is significant

In our previous post, we explored a projection that saw our NPM results reaching 2 million downloads per month, in early 2022. The November milestone supports this projection. 

It tells a story that our ongoing development work is positively impacting our rate of adoption by developers. And thanks to NPM having included a new metrics view in January (to display weekly download numbers) we can check on how the trend progresses, on an ongoing basis.

How can you Download TinyMCE through NPM?

To try out TinyMCE through the NPM:

1. Navigate to the TinyMCE page on the NPM website
2. Copy the command to install the TinyMCE files: npm i tinymce
3. Paste the command into your terminal or command line shell, and modify the arguments as needed. For example:

npm install tinymce@^5

+ tinymce@5.9.2

added 1 package from 1 contributor and audited 26 packages in 1.07s

found 0 vulnerabilities

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