I did this analysis in March. – Bret

Why do I say that Watir has 85,000 downloads?

There are basically three ways that people have download Watir:

Downloading the exe file from Rubyforge.org
Installing the gem from Rubyforge.org
Downloading the development gems from confluence (OpenQA).

We only have figures for the first two, but these presumably represent most of the downloads.

Rubyforge File Downloads

This chart summarizes the downloads from rubyforge. These peaked at 3,500 a month in June 2007, when we released Watir 1.5 as a gem. Presumably the trend continued, but we don't have monthly figures for the gems.

This page provides details for downloads by version. Note that these figures do include Gem downloads, but not Gem installs (which is the most common way to use Gems). (Need to confirm this).

Version	Downloads
1.5.3 gem	2,250
1.5.2 gem	1,275
1.4.1 exe	39,000
1.4.1 gem	7,950
1.4 zip	6,250
1.3.1 zip	3,325
total	60,050

This page
summarizes downloads by project. At this time it lists Watir as 83,775 for Watir, which i think includes some of the related subprojects (e.g. Scripting 101).

Gem Installs

This page lists gem installs by project.

watir 26317

Because this figure clearly is much larger than the gem downloads detailed above. I assume that this figure represents the downloads made through the "gem install watir" system itself, whereas the above figures represent manual downloads.

Total

So a conservative estimate is that Watir has over 85,000 downloads, and may have over 100,000.

These figures do not include the development gems, but these were probably only downloaded by maybe 10% (complete guess) of the users at the time.

Trends

We made this same calculation last fall (October, this was when we were planning the book, so we can get a more accurate figure by checking our email logs). At that time the total was 50,000.

That means that Watir downloads have averaged at least 5,500 a month, a figure which is consistent with the straight-line trend detailed in the graph above.