Open Source Business Metrics: Repo Popularity Metrics
Metric Description:
Another important top-of-funnel metric is project traffic and activity on sites like GitHub or GitLab, which offer more meaningful data over a metric like GitHub stars. In principle, more stars on GitHub would seem to equate to more interest or growth, but there is cause to think twice. A cursory search shows that dozens of services will give hundreds or thousands of stars to your project for only a few dollars. Some projects hold a suspiciously large number of stars for the code available.
Rather, project traffic and activity as reflected by the number of issues, merges, commits, etc., on GitHub, prove more telling. Moreover, it is more important to evaluate the number of unique users performing those activities over the raw number of activities. Unique traffic to your repositories, the unique number of forks, and the unique number of clones of your repo are all worth tracking in order to gauge growth.
Example Metrics:
- # stars or likes for a repo
- correlated star growth with the # of issues, merges, etc
Goals:
You are attempting to gauge the popularity of your project with these metrics. Popularity gives a higher chance of conversion to users ( or future users ). This metric is also often used a vanity metric by investors and owners.External Links
- A good analysis of cockroach labs github stars: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/what-can-we-learn-from-our-github-stars/
- A wonderful tool that analyzes github data: https://ossinsight.io/
- A quick tool to check trends for github stars: https://star-history.com/
- An older discussion, but interesting on github stars: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5110/github-stars-is-a-very-useful-metric-but-for-what