This chart provides a fascinating insight into the current user demographic on Thingiverse, where registered users have self-identified as a particular category on their profiles.

The surprising thing that leaps out from the chart is that teachers make up the smallest demographic group, with just 5.47% of the overall chart. That’s relevant because many desktop 3D printer manufacturers have identified education as an important market and pivoted accordingly. Is it possible that the market has been overestimated?

By way of a counterbalance, Students make up the third biggest demographic of the chart, with 15.95%. This could indicate that students have a significantly greater appetite for 3D printing, and perhaps there aren’t enough qualified individuals to teach them. Education leaders need to play catch-up?

But then again, the lion’s share of the demographics are given over to Makers and Engineers, occupying 50% of the chart between them. And since these labels are self-identified, there’s some flexibility in how they’re applied. Perhaps the case is that a teacher or a student would strongly prefer to identify first and foremost as a maker or an engineer.

“This is an interesting data set,” Tony says. “We know a lot of our users are Teachers, however in the beginning when creating a new account you could only identify as one type of user, so they may have chosen Maker instead of Teacher. Since we’ve added the ability to set multiple types, we need to get more people to update their profiles.”

This is a breakdown of the top 20 countries visiting Thingiverse in the past 30 days.

It’s not surprising that the United States makes up the lion’s share, with one third of traffic in total. This reflects the fact that Thingiverse has strong roots in the US maker scene, and that many users of Thingiverse came to the site via the MakerBot line of desktop 3D printers.

Rounding out the top five in smaller numbers are Germany, the United Kingdon, France and Canada. And looking towards the bottom of the chart, we find precious few visitors from India, China and Turkey.

Tony adds:

“As someone who’s been with Thingiverse from almost the very beginning, it’s inspiring to see both Thingiverse and 3D printing spread around the world. It’s also very interesting to note that although we only support English, it appears nearly half of our visitors are not from English speaking countries.”

Another insight from this chart would be that those countries who are especially active in the production of desktop 3D printers — China, Poland, the Netherlands — are not especially well represented as Thingiverse users. Those nations perhaps have alternative sources for 3D models. Or the bulk of their customers reside overseas.

Finally we have the breakdown of Thing Origin; the software used to design the objects for 3D printing.

This chart is interesting because it seems to present a split between various software packages, with no clear leader. And that’s despite the vast differences in complexity and cost from software package to software package.

But looking a little closer, you will see that one software company emerges as the leader of the pack. Autodesk owns 4 of the 10 software packages on this list — Tinkercad, 123D Design (discontinued), Inventor, and Fusion 360 — which gives them a cumulative share of 41.58%.

Their various products present a “ladder” from easy to difficult 3D modeling software, and it’s pretty canny. That doesn’t mean they have a total monopoly, however.

Open source or free programs like Blender (7.16%), OpenSCAD (14.23%)  and FreeCAD (4.42%) are also present and correct. And then you have business CAD applications like Rhino (3.49%) and Solidworks (13.99%) which are industry stalwarts.

By way of comparison, presented below is a chart of popular applications based on self-identification from Thingiverse users. Some discrepancies arise between the actual use for an application versus stated use, for example with Tinkercad and Blender.

Moreover, there are several applications in the self-professed chart that make no showing at all in the primary chart, like Photoshop, Illustrator and Meshmixer. A curious development.