Hi everyone,
I am making some resaerch on ad-blocking popularity. While this type of information is easily available on web stores for extension-based ad-blockers, I can not find it for proxy-based or dns-based ad-blocker.
Can anyone from the team update me about it?
Many thanks
Our Pi-hole subReddit has 144k members, as one indicator.
Other than that, we don't know how many users we have.
Pi-hole does not track and/or count any users. We do not collect any telemetry. You might use github forks/stars as an indicator.
Thank you for your reply, subReddit members is an indicator but not an accurate one. I used Pi-Hole before without being a member in the subreddit group.
It is good to know that Pi-Hole has no metric collected from the end-users, nevertheless, can we have a roughly estimated figures, for instance, a software with average subReddit members of 144K, is estimated to have 3 times more installations, i.e., 144K*3 = 432K users. I mean just any heuristic that I can use for estimation, if there is any.
subReddit members is an indicator but not an accurate one
I agree. This is not the total number of users. I used Pi-hole without a Reddit account for some time.
Some people also mention the number of stars on Github as another possible indicator (or even number of forks on Github).
These are just indicators, but they say nothing about the real number of users.
I'm not sure if your idea of "3 times more installations" is accurate either.
Let's use Portainer as an example, since a lot of our users use Portainer too:
I'm not saying Pi-hole has more users than Portainer.
I think these indicators are saying that our users are more active.
Conclusion:
We don't use any kind of telemetry or tracking. It's really impossible to know the real numbers.
Since we don't track any user stats or installation counts, you will likely have to develop your own heuristics for your estimate, and justify these in your paper.
We don't know any more than we have already told you.
Thank you all for your reply. It was really helpful.