Quote - shrug

*I'd say that users of Flash animations represent a far larger proportion of web traffic than do heavy 3D-only users.

You can always find larger sites.  But you need to compare apples with apples.*

Yeah, why is that?  Flash used to be known as that annoying plugin that puts distracting ads on your webpages.  Professional animators looked at it, and thought it was useless for serious animation work.

And when Newgrounds came out, its reputation was even worse than Flash in general - people thought everything on it was tacky, amateur, tasteless, poorly drawn junk that made you want to break your TV screen.

I can only assume that Newgrounds had deep faith in what it was and who it supported, and allowed the visitors to do what they did best - rather than, say, assume that the visitors had to be kept in check, lest they "scare off" other visitors.

Then they started attracting more and more people - including people with more experience, and more talent.

Xeophonz, If we accept that there is a natural difference of interest between Flash animations and 3D pictures, why did the ratio of that difference increase over the past five years?  In 2002, We can see that Newgrounds hovered around 75 million pageviews/day, versus 20 million pageviews/day.

Why did Newgrounds double to roughly 100 million pageviews/day, while Renderosity stagnated at the same level?  In fact, if we look at the 2006-7 years, Renderosity's pageview count has drifted downward, nearing the 10 million pageviews/day level.

If you want something more apple-y .. well.. you should take a look at cgsociety.org sometime.

Just take a look at the front page, and you'll see some pretty impressive stuff.  Then head off to Alexa and check the statistics, and you'll be impressed again.

These are the folks who wanted to be treated like adults, and the place they found that would let them.  Renderosity could have had them on their side, and still kept an atmosphere for beginners - but this site had different ideas.