This is a mid-year review of how the sites Furbitron monitors are projected to fare for all of 2023, and how that compares to 2022.

tl;dr:

2023 may be the third year in a row where FurAffinity will not have year-on-year growth. 2023 will probably be the best year ever for e621. Some of the smaller sites enjoyed an "FA bump" in their post rates towards the end of May.

FurAffinity submission ID 55,000,000 will probably happen around December 20, 2023 - possibly a little earlier.

tl;dr, but as a table:

Site          Estimate   vs 2022
Buzzly           18,400  -91%
FurAffinity   4,620,000  -10%
FurryNetwork     52,000  +18%
SoFurry         142,000   +4.0%
Weasyl          135,000  +24%
e621            725,000  +18%
e6AI              7,560 +770%

(submission estimates are rounded)

The "FA bump"

FA revised their acceptable upload policy on May 19, 2023, and posted additional updates on May 22 and May 24. The net effect was that some artwork that was previously considered acceptable on FA is no longer considered acceptable. This change did not find favor with some artists and other FA users.

At least some artists seem to have increased their usage of smaller furry art sites in response. This is easiest to see on the past-year graphs for the lower-volume sites that Furbitron monitors; look for a slight increase in the post rate starting just after mid-May, 2023:

https://furbitron.com/site-furrynetwork-0365.html

https://furbitron.com/site-sofurry-0365.html

https://furbitron.com/site-weasyl-0365.html

You can also somewhat see the increased post rate on the year-on-year graphs for the lower-volume sites; look at the white line, starting just before day 150:

https://furbitron.com/site-furrynetwork-yoy1.html

https://furbitron.com/site-sofurry-yoy1.html

https://furbitron.com/site-weasyl-yoy1.html

The data for Buzzly and e621 don't reflect an "FA bump" at this time.

Buzzly

Buzzly is projected to have about 18,400 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 91% lower than the 215,000 submission IDs in 2022.

Buzzly launched in late 2021, and experienced fast growth through early 2022; during that time, it often had days with 1,000 new posts a day.

Around February and March 2022, there were some communications from Buzzly staff, and changes in their acceptable upload policy, that did not find favor with many of their users.

As a result, the post rate at Buzzly dropped off a lot in mid-March 2022. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, Buzzly is averaging about 50 new posts a day.

FurAffinity

FurAffinity is projected to have about 4,620,000 submissions in 2023. This would be 10% lower than the 5,140,000 submissions in 2022, and would mark the third year ever where FA would not have year-on-year growth.

FA's upload policy changes in March 2023, mentioned above, do not yet seem to have made a significant impact on the post rate at FA. On the other hand, that change has only been in place for about a month and a half as of this writing. The effect, if any, may become more apparent in the future.

Going strictly by the numbers, FurAffinity will probably reach submission ID 55,000,000 around December 20, 2023.

In reality, it will probably happen a few days sooner than that - as the submission IDs increase, more people will post submissions, hoping to have the 55,000,000th submission.

FurryNetwork

FurryNetwork is projected to have about 52,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 18% higher than the 44,000 submission IDs in 2022.

SoFurry

SoFurry is projected to have about 142,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 4.0% higher than the 136,600 submissions in 2022.

SoFurry reached submission ID 2,000,000 on June 10, 2023.

Weasyl

Weasyl is projected to have about 135,000 submission IDs in 2023. This would be 24% higher than the 109,000 submission IDs in 2022.

e621

e621 is projected to have about 725,000 submission IDs in 2023. This is 6.0% higher than the 684,000 submission IDs in 2022, and would continue e621's history of year-on-year submission ID growth since 2009.

e6AI

e6AI is projected to have about 7,560 submission IDs in 2023. This is 770% higher than the 865 submission IDs in 2022. e6AI first went online in mid-October 2022, so 2023 will be its first full year of operation.

e6AI specializes in AI-generated images. e6AI is operated by the same people as e621, and uses the same software as e621.

Furbitron added basic tracking of e6AI in early December 2022. Furbitron collects data and computes the statistics for e6AI daily, but does not yet display the graphs for e6AI.

Notes and disclaimers

These are linear extrapolations to 2023-12-31, based on data from 2023-01-01 to 2023-07-11.

The submission ID counts in this post have been rounded off. They should be accurate to within 1% or so.

The owners of the various sites can directly query their site's database, so they may publish slightly different numbers than are found here.

The numbers here come from Furbitron's monitoring of the sites listed. The historical data was mostly gathered from the sites in September 2021. e621 provides a dump of their site database, so the historical data for e621 came from that dump in September 2021. Since then, Furbitron has done "live" monitoring of each site, once a day.

Edit, 2023-07-11: Added data for e6AI.

Thanks!

Furbitron
https://furbitron.com/