Anyone with a 3D printer will no doubt be familiar with Thingiverse, an online database of files that can be searched, downloaded and 3D printed; a universe of things. I’ve been using it for 7 years, and you can find many of my projects from this blog available there.

While the platform isn’t without its issues, particularly over the last year or so, it is still the largest 3D printing file database with over 1.9 million files at this time of writing – you couldn’t print that much stuff in a lifetime!

Because of the scale, many researchers have used Thingiverse as a way of understanding how people engage with 3D printing and file sharing, and beginning in 2018, I wanted to understand the characteristics of the most popular files on Thingiverse. My research paper has just been published called “500 days of Thingiverse: a longitudinal study of 30 popular things for 3D printing” and as the name suggests, involved tracking 30 things over a 500 day period.

The image at the top is one of the graphs from the paper that compares the downloads per day for these 30 things over time. At the start of the study, a new design called the Xbox One controller mini wheel had just been released and was all over social media, attracting a lot of attention and downloads. This equated to 698 downloads per day. However, this momentum didn’t last. In comparison, well established designs like #3DBenchy continued to increase in downloads per day, and during the period of this study, #3DBenchy became the first thing on Thingiverse to be downloaded over 1 million times! These numbers are beginning to approach figures on more mainstream social media and image/video sites, showing just how popular 3D printing has become. And keep in mind, this is just one of many file sharing websites for 3D printing, a topic that was part of a previous research paper I wrote with friend, colleague and fellow maker, Paul Bardini.

If you’re interested in all the details, I have shared a preprint version of the paper which can be freely accessed. Additionally, all of the raw data can be freely accessed if you’re interested in diving into the nitty gritty details, or even continuing to add to what I started. I hope this provides some insights into the scale of making and 3D printing, and some of the trends that drive the most popular files on Thingiverse.

– Posted by James Novak