Metrics

Approximate Minimum Total CC Licensed Works as of December 2010: 400+ million Also see the noisier monthly version and the source spreadsheet (ods), (xls).

The Metrics Portal is about gathering, processing and visualizing metrics about Creative Commons' related projects, with particular emphasis on the adoption and usage of Creative Commons licenses internationally. Join us!

The best place to communicate on this is through the cc-community mailing list for general discussion, cc-devel for technical discussion, and the #cc chat channel on irc.freenode.net. If really deep into this, please consider joining into the commons-research community. Join in the fun!

CC Monitor Project

This is the home of the CC-Monitor online platform, which contains automatically collected data, graphs, research and collectively written commentary on the global adoption of Creative Commons licenses. It is our hope that this will become a valuable online resource for the Creative Commons community, for researchers, the press, and other third parties. We will invite many more experts on CC and all things 'open' to contribute to this resource in due time. Click on any of the links below to access statistical information, original research and commentary on the adoption of Creative Commons around the world.

See the Site

Research and Presentations

Chart of Global CC adoption and licensing permissiveness. Courtesy the Participatory Media Lab -- more visualizations available here and an explanation of this chart here.

Giorgos Cheliotis and the researchers at the Participatory Media Lab based at Singapore Management Univerity have been tracking and analyzing the development of Creative Commons worldwide. His 2007 TRPC paper "Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment," is available here. The Lab's research wiki is a great resource for some of the latest research on CC adoption. Further slides:

• http://www.slideshare.net/gcheliotis/assessing-cc-adoption-in-asia-manila (2009)

Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons, has also given a few presentations in the past on the analysis and development of metrics for measuring the progress of CC licensing:

• http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/cci-legal-day-metrics-update-2008-07-29
• http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/acia-2008-toward-useful-creative-commons-adoption-metrics
• http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/creative-commons-metrics/ (2007)

The First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture held in August, 2008 featured several metrics-related presentations.

Others on Flickr data.

Aggregate web pages licensed

License statistics has basic information about linkback/page/search-engine-query-based license adoption statistics, as well as the code used to gather this data and dumps of the data itself.

Site-specific metrics

Content Directories lists licensed works counts for many sites that collect CC-licensed works, e.g., about 100 million at Flickr.

Counts for selected top sites over time may be found on the license statistics page.

Eventually code above should be expanded to collect this and finer-grained information (e.g., per site license breakdown) from these sites. See Site CC Portal and Metrics for information on how your site can help.

Other quantitative metrics

• creativecommons.org traffic:
  • Alexa
  • Compete
  • Quantcast
  • Google Trends (also see Google Trends on "creative commons" keyword searches)
• Number of journals, publishers (e.g., PLoS)
• Feature films that have been released in theaters.
• Universities?
• Press agencies?
• Add ideas and methodology for collecting metrics here.

• CC web server logs:
  • Historical data on license choices at the "License your work" CC license chooser
  • Indications based on referrers to our image icons to see if people change the license on web pages or other licensed documents
  • Indications based on image icon loading frequency as to which licenses are used by content widely seen by users
  • Analysis of search.creativecommons.org logs to see what sorts of licenses and items people search for - and if that has changed over time
  • Analysis of license deeds to see if deed information affects choices in /license/
  • Geographic sub-analysis of the above
  • Code to reproducibly and consistently generate the above statistics.

Follow updates on ccLabs.

Qualitative metrics

• Case Studies
• Awards Received (grammys, oscars, etc)
• "bestsellers" for some definition of best-seller from Books
• Add ideas here...

Data

Creative Commons Data

• Queries against search engines for linkbacks to our licenses
• Site specific license counts
• Scrubbed Creative Commons Apache logs (eventually)

Other Datasets

• Any other data sets? Add them here...

Tools

• ccTools used for license statistic gathering
• Add your tools here!

Numbers Explanation

The Approximate Minimum Total CC Licensed Works is based on licenses reported by Yahoo search queries and Flickr and is the minimum number of licensed works across all licenses (Flickr numbers are used for the 6 main 2.0 licenses -- which are all that Flickr supports -- since we know at least those exist). See the estimation code, estimates, and data.