The Big SUMO Report: 2016

Hey there, SUMO Nation!

Since 2017 has finally arrived (a while ago), our team wanted to share a few numbers and remarks with you. This report is a bit delayed, but we hope it will prove to be worth the extra few days’ wait.

We are on the brink of probably the biggest change to the “way things are” around SUMO in the recent years, so taking a good look back is a great way to make sure we stay focused on the road ahead.

2016 has not been an easy year for many members of our community, for many reasons. Fortunately, we all persevered and managed to come out stronger / wiser / more prepared on this side of the calendar. We will definitely keep working together on many aspects of our site, our community, and our presence in Mozilla’s mission. Our small core team counts on your presence and strength and you can count on our support. You rock the helpful web.

As for all the data you will see on this page and the ones it links to: remember that while we use some of these numbers to prepare plans for the future and put them into reality, they are just numbers – and as such cannot and will not fully represent the passion, the values, the talent and effort behind every single angry user turned into a happy one thanks to your dedication to making the open web better and more helpful.

For all that we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Now, let’s get on with the show!

SUMO 2016 – the major facts

• We joined forces with the Marketing Team, becoming a part of MarComms, and working more closely with the Mozillians at the heart of Social and PR projects.
• With Firefox 46, we started publishing SUMO Release Reports, which met with a very positive response from all sides of Mozilla:
  • Firefox 46
  • Firefox 47
  • Firefox 48
  • Firefox 49
  • Firefox 50 
• Kitsune, our home-made support platform went through a LOT of changes, the final of which was the decision to replace it with an external solution, due to our lovely developer team being reassigned to other parts of the Mozilla project. We spent the better part of the second half of the year investigating the next generation of SUMO tech. We should be using the new platform any day now…
• Social Support and Army of Awesome morphed into two different beasts this year. While trying out a new tool (Sprinklr), a robust social engagement tool used for brand marketing, we engaged many new people, but it took us some time to refine our goals.
  • We started to onboard with a goal of 25 active volunteers and soon found the tool overwhelming for just a few volunteers. Once we moved to another tool (Respond), a new community was created from the retiring Army of Awesome and the 4 main Mozilla Brand Social accounts for English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French languages. After transitioning to the new support tool, 33 people received training and the response rate went up from 10% to 33%.
• The Knowledge Base articles explaining how to contribute were revised, rewritten and re-read aplenty :-)
• We kicked off the “Internet Awareness” project – an exploration of a new way of educating users about the web.
• Safwan saved many a gray hair from appearing for numerous localizers through his Save as Draft feature.
• We changed a bit the way our Community Meetings worked, and we went full HD, 3D, hypersurround sound with AirMozilla (thanks, Costenslayer!)
• SUMO went places! #sumotourctg, SUMO@FOSDEM, SUMO Contributor Mentoring Day, SUMO l10n Sprint in Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Ivory Coast, Jakarta,
• We improved the SUMO Event Kit based on your feedback.
• This blog had 68 new posts and over 9,200 page views. Some of the best posts this year were written by you! Still, support.mozilla.org seems a bit more popular (see more details on that below) – but we are slowly catching up! ;-)

SUMO 2016 in numbers – the highlights

As you can imagine, our activity and its results can be described in many ways – and by many numbers. It would be a daunting task to put all of them here in a coherent way, so we decided to summarize data showing the potential, reach, and power of SUMO – both as a source of knowledge and help, and as an example of community collaboration.

General site stats

• Number of total page views: 806,225,837
• Number of users with at least one recorded session (= visit to the site): 259,584,893
• Number of sessions (= periods of active user engagement on the site): 446,537,566
• Percentage of people returning to the site: 45%
• Average time spent on site per session: 01:39
• Average number of pages visited per session: 1.81
• Percentage of single page visits: 25%

Community stats

• • Number of people who created a SUMO account: 57,656
  • Number of people who contributed for the first time: 1,153
  • Percentage of people who visited SUMO using Firefox: 84%
  • Percentage of people who visited SUMO using Chrome: 7% / Safari: 4% / Internet Explorer: 3%

Language & Knowledge Base stats

• Top visitor 10 languages (by percentage of sessions):
  1. English
  2. German
  3. French
  4. Spanish
  5. Japanese
  6. Russian
  7. Portuguese (Brazil)
  8. Polish
  9. Italian
  10. Chinese (simplified)
• Top 10 visitor countries (by percentage of sessions):
  1. United States
  2. Germany
  3. Japan
  4. France
  5. Brazil
  6. Russia
  7. India
  8. United Kingdom
  9. Poland
  10. Indonesia
• An interesting euro-fact: the top 5 countries by percentage of sessions from the European Union region were over 24% of all sessions in 2016.
• Number of all submitted revisions:
  • for English only: 2,068
  • for the top 20 locales: 14,177
  • in all locales: 21,741 (almost 60 a day on average!)
• The most active Knowledge Base contributors in 2016 – each and every one of you is an e-linguistic superstar! Major shout-outs go to:

(For more general data please check this document)

Support Forum

Here are the top viewed items for 2016, also considered to be the most “popular” in terms of issues raised by users across the board, in no particular order:

• My Youtube videos won’t load. “An error occurred, please try again later”.
• Insecure Connection – “Your connection is not secure”
• I got a Urgent Firefox update from [URL] Should I manually install? and Urgent Fire Fox Update Notice
• Twitter videos – “the media could not be played” – Solution

• users looking for the offline installers for Firefox
• people who want to how to cast a mobile device to a monitor
• users wondering how to change the interface language
• people who have problems using the full screen mode

All in all, it’s been quite a busy year, and there was so much great support from your side that it would not all fit into this blog post (we tried, the blog almost exploded), so do browse the highlight below and make sure you check the document linked at the end of this section. All your dedication and hard work throughout last year paid off and we are all grateful to each and every one of you for making SUMO’s support forums the best official support site for Mozilla’s software! As a bonus, there’s about two million smiles from Rachel for everyone who replied to a question, I hear ;-) Roll on with the numbers!

• Percentage of users (from 11,604 responses recorded through the Exit Survey):
  • very satisfied with Firefox: 31.6%
  • satisfied with Firefox: 27.3%
  • neutral towards Firefox: 13.0%
  • dissatisfied with Firefox: 11.3%
  • very dissatisfied with Firefox: 11.1%
• Percentage of users who visited SUMO to:
  • find a solution to a problem: 74,7%
  • learn more about Firefox: 13.2%
  • do something else: 12.1%
• Percentage of users who:
  • found what they were looking for on SUMO: 40.2%
  • did not find what they were looking for on SUMO: 47.6%
  • don’t know what to say about the result of their visit: 12.2%
• The most active Support Forum contributors in 2016 – each and every one of you is a guardian angel of cyberspace! Major shout-outs go to:

You can find a more in-depth analysis of the year’s most popular and memorable forum content here (thank you, Rachel!).

Social Support

Remembering the Awesome… Army of Awesome!

• We had 390 members of the Army of Awesome contributing until its very last day in 2016
• They contributed in German, English, French, Galego (!), Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese… You can see more data about their contributions here.

As a reminder: The Army of Awesome was a self service support program of one to one user support, with a glorious legion of amazing people around the world responding to Firefox (and not only) users in trouble through Twitter. It was morphed into a Social Support program that you can sign up for through form and learn more about from this wiki.

For January to March, please take a look at the project start document here.

Most active contributors on Social: March to September

October to December (welcome, Sierra!)

• Average time to a first reply on Social:
  • 1d 21h (for the period from October to December)
• The lowest average time to a first reply on Social: 8 hours during one of the weeks in December!

SUMO 2016 in your words

Nope, it’s not enough that this is “probably the longest post on this blog, ever!” This is where we would love to see you step in :-) Please use the comment section to share your best and not so good SUMO (or Mozilla) moments from the last calendar year. If you think we should anything else to the report, please use the comments section as well.

We look forward to hearing from you!