Greetings fellow statheads! A good number of people in the forums (esp. @CrimsonKero, @Cyberdevil, and @ShangXian) have asked me about where to get statistics on NG content, traffic, and rankings. Today, thanks to the Marxist Communist Data Liberation Team (no affiliation), I'm able to share a treasure trove: stats on every single "saved" (ie not blammed) movie portal submission from 2024. I received this data back in April, but I haven't been able to verify it until recently. Having manually spot checked hundreds of entries and automatically verified thousands more against the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (so as to not touch Newgrounds), I can comfortably vouch that this is the real deal!
The Data
You can download the zipped database from my dump here and you can interactively explore it via SQL here. If you're insane and want to use Excel to analyze over thirty thousand records, you can download the dataset as a CSV here.
Disclaimer:
This dataset seems to have been collected over a few weeks in early April 2025 and thus represents a spread "moment in time". It reflects the state of movie portal submissions looking back at 2024 from early 2025. Submissions from early in 2024 will have had more time to accumulate views and rating than those released later in the year. By definition, "blammed", unpublished or otherwise deleted submissions will not appear in this dataset as they were removed. This data covers the movie portal and the movie portal only. It does not cover general "hits" to the site nor any content not published in 2024.
I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Marxist Communist Data Liberation Team. I have non-deterministically verified this data, but I did not collect it. If this dataset doesn't have the data you need, it doesn't have the data you need. Soz.
What the Data Covers
For every movie published in 2024 that wasn't subsequently blammed, deleted, or unpublished:
sqlite> .schema movies CREATE TABLE movies ( id TEXT PRIMARY KEY, date TEXT NOT NULL, title TEXT NOT NULL, rating TEXT NOT NULL, author TEXT NOT NULL, thumb TEXT NOT NULL, url TEXT NOT NULL , views INTEGER DEFAULT 0, score REAL DEFAULT 0.0, frontpaged BOOLEAN DEFAULT 0, daily INTEGER DEFAULT 0, weekly INTEGER DEFAULT 0, monthly INTEGER DEFAULT 0);
In other words, for every movie we get:
- the publication date
- the title
- the rating
- the author
- the accumulated views
- the score
- if the movie was frontpaged
- if it won a daily award and where it placed
- if it won a weekly award and where it placed
- if it won a monthly award and where it placed
With that, let's use the data to answer some questions about NG in 2024!
Where Do My Animations Rank in Terms of Total Views?
To answer this, first download the database from my dump. Unzip it anywhere on your machine and then go to the SQL.js Interpreter. Click the "Load DB" button and select the uncompressed database (ie the .db file).
The way this works is that you enter queries in a special language called SQL in the "SQL Editor" on the left (top on mobile) and get you answer on the right after hitting the "Execute" button.
To make sure you've properly loaded the data, copy and paste this into the "SQL Editor", replacing anything that's already there:
select COUNT(*) as count from movies;
Now hit "Execute".
If you get 31367, everything is working properly and you just need to find your "canonical" Newgrounds name. That's your name exactly as it appeared (including capitalization) at the end of 2024. As an example, for @KittyhawkMontrose it's
KittyhawkMontrose
Usually, it will just be your name as it appears on your profile page. If you're having trouble, you can download the CSV and find your name by searching for the title of a movie you released in 2024.
Once you know your canonical name, just replace everything in the left hand side with this (replacing KittyhawkMontrose with your name, of course):
WITH rankings AS (SELECT author, SUM(views) as total, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SUM(views) DESC) as rank FROM movies GROUP BY author ORDER BY total DESC) SELECT * FROM rankings WHERE author = 'KittyhawkMontrose';
Hit "Execute" and you should get an answer like this:
That's it! That's your total views across all your movies and your overall ranking (out of roughly 10k) for 2024. If enough people have trouble with this and want it, I might build a utility for doing this automatically. Just let me know in the comments.
Who Was #1?
sqlite> SELECT author, SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies GROUP BY author ORDER BY total_views DESC LIMIT 1; Diives|5221661
The answer, hands down, is @Diives with an incredible 5,221,661 views across all of the movies he published in 2024. The second most viewed creator had literally less than half that, so yeah. Congratulations Diives!
Is Newgrounds a Porn Site?
Oh boy. Here we go. Well there are two ways to approach that question. From the point of view (pun intended) of individual movies and from the point of view of creators. Let's look at the content angle first:
sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-e'; 5126856 sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-t'; 5576894 sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-m'; 4738918 sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a'; 101829696
And let's also take a look at the top five adult creators:
sqlite> SELECT author, SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE author IN ( SELECT DISTINCT author FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a' ) GROUP BY author ORDER BY total_views DESC LIMIT 5; Diives|5221661 Amplected|2207617 Hentaivr|1762423 bewyx|1617333 Redmoa|1534696
And their non-adult counterparts:
sqlite> SELECT author, SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE author NOT IN ( SELECT DISTINCT author FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a' ) GROUP BY author ORDER BY total_views DESC LIMIT 5; SrPelo|302996 Speedo|264632 NoMoreChie|167830 Magibauble|134172 PhantomArcade|126917
Comparing the two groups:
The lower estimate still shows 87% of the views in 2024 went to adult movies. That's 1.45 times the ratio of water in the human body. The state of Ohio is only 80% white. Newgrounds is a porn site. Like Playboy, that doesn't mean that a porn site is all Newgrounds is, Playboy had Gore Vidal and we have Luis. Still, anyone who tells you NG is not first and foremost a porn site is probably trying to raise another round of funding for an indie game.
How Big Is Animation on NG?
Remember, this dataset only covers movies and only covers content released in 2024, it does not cover "legacy" content. Still, if you're a new animator, hits to a gen-x legacy you missed out on are basically irrelevant.
Let's separate adult and non-adult NG:
sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating != 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a'; 15442668 sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views FROM movies WHERE rating = 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a'; 101829696
That's about 15.5 million views for non-adult movie content in 2024 and little over 100 million views for adult content (speaking of NG being a porn site).
According to Social Blade, all of adult NG's movie views are roughly on par with gaming personality OneyPlays, while collective non-adult NG would be doing a little worse than dad-tuber Techmoan.
A quote attributed to everyone from Sir Isaac Newton to Henry Kissinger comes to mind:
The reason that university politics is so vicious is because the stakes are so small.
How Real Is the "Front Page" Effect?
Well. Funny thing that:
sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views_top_5 FROM ( SELECT views FROM movies WHERE rating != 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a' AND frontpaged = 1 ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 5); 858392 sqlite> SELECT SUM(views) as total_views_top_5 FROM ( SELECT views FROM movies WHERE rating != 'nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a' AND frontpaged = 0 ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 5); 1023558
That's certainly confusing. Even if we screen out adult content, frontpaged content has about 4% less of a chance of being seen than movies that were never featured. Logically, being frontpaged shouldn't hurt you. What gives? I've done even more complicated analysis and this effect weirdly persists. My intuition is that this negative correlation results from the causality running opposite the way you think it would. That is: if the taste of the people choosing the movies to feature is negatively correlated with the taste of the site as a whole strongly enough, they will only pick movies so disliked that it appears there's no advantage to being frontpaged. That doesn't mean that on a case by case basis it isn't better to be frontpaged than not. It just means that the people creating the front page are out of touch enough that on aggregate it hides the real advantage to the front page. The other possibility is that there is some kink to the interface where if you're only frontpaged for a short time that it really is harder to find you. The famous "five second frontpaging". This sort of counter-intuitive rabbit hole is why I love this stuff.
Who Is King S#1t?
I owe @BrandyBuizel a personal apology on this one. I told him it was ZabuJard, but I was misremembering:
sqlite> SELECT author, COUNT(*) as movie_count FROM movies GROUP BY author ORDER BY movie_count DESC LIMIT 5; davi-snuky62|376
Insanely, davi-snuky62 has managed to produce more than a movie a day and that's ignoring his unknown blam rate. It's very possible he submitted over 400 movies last year.
Should NG Get Rid of Kids?
Earlier this year, the minimum sign up age for NG was raised to 14. I was apposed to this idea (and of the minimum age creeping up over time) on principal. However, I've become more open minded to the need to do so based on this dataset. Take a look at this:
sqlite> SELECT rating, COUNT(*) as movie_count FROM movies GROUP BY rating ORDER BY movie_count DESC;
nohue-ngicon-small-rated-e|13323
nohue-ngicon-small-rated-t|7980
nohue-ngicon-small-rated-a|7710
nohue-ngicon-small-rated-m|2354
This is the graph for movie submissions. It looks a lot more diverse than the graph for views doesn't it? That's a problem. This chart suggests that almost all of the site resources: moderator attention, storage, liability exposure, etc, it's all being "wasted" on content no one is going to view.
Of course, the flipside is that new users have to start somewhere. I'm not saying that the opening song to the musical "Gigi" isn't creepy, but academics have made very convincing arguments that time is linear and hasn't stopped despite the wishes of boomers. It has been observed that kids grow up. This is a matter of striking a balance between short term pain versus long term gain. The thing is, the short term pain is very real and resources are tight.
What Else Can We Find Out?
That's where you can come in. I'm sharing forward the dataset to see what other fun analysis can be run. If you find a really interesting SQL query or a fun chart, please share it in the comments. Since NG is a porn site, we need to make sure that dataporn is well represented.
Update 01:
To those inclined to believe this post was driven by some sort of grudge regarding recent contraversy, I point you to my post on the 4th of April to the "Near Zero Effort (I Promise!) Share Thread". There I share some code that is obviously used to verify this data against the Wayback Machine.
I would also point you to the date the db was uploaded to my dump: the 25th of April.
If I was a-going time travelin' I wouldn't be here, I'd be assassinating H**ler and meeting a young Bette Midler.
Update 02:
Music mod @ADR3-N has proposed:
A new forum for adult art/animation/etc content, ofc locked to anyone under 18 (pre-existing forum rules ofc apply)
In light of the data I think this is more than reasonable. It being basically verboten to post/discuss 90% of the content on the site in the forums is, to paraphrase one of my favourite commentators, "ka-ah-raze-eeeeeee".
YendorTOO
Holy Grep command, Batman!
alsoknownas1
I did be that way.