Overall usage is up only 3.8% for September, which isn’t too surprising nor is it bad. Vista share grew only a very small amount, and 64-bit is basically at the same level it was in August – it’s still disappointingly low. Overall there isn’t really much to say this month that hasn’t been said already for August, or June or July. My bet is that Vista’s share will jump right around Christmas time.

To grow Paint.NET’s userbase further, I think it will take the addition of some killer new features that people have been clamoring for. And maybe some others that they haven’t but will nonetheless be quite awesome.

Revenue was much higher than in August and is still going strong into September, although I have noticed the “new release afterglow” is now starting to wear off (version 3.10 was published on August 24^th). Donations always spike very strongly after a new release for about 10 days (by the way, thanks to everyone who has donated! It really does make a difference!). AdSense also takes a healthy jump but doesn’t exhibit the same derivatives. It tends to show a much smaller short-term spike, after which it grows over the following few weeks and then cools off over about the same amount of time. My guess is that a freshly updated web page is simply more valued by AdSense (I could be completely wrong of course). It may be prudent to time a release in order to take advantage of the Q4 advertising spree, as John Chow puts it. By the way, he recently broke past $20,000 / month with just his blog. I would love to accomplish the same with Paint.NET, all while continuing to give it away for free.

As a reminder, these statistics represent hits to the auto-updater manifests, which means they approximately reveal the Paint.NET application’s usage. Unless the auto-updater is disabled, it will check for updates up to once every 5 days at application startup. This is done by downloading a text file whose filename is decorated with OS and language information. Having 1.2 million hits to the manifest does not mean that Paint.NET has 1.2 million installations, or 1.2 million active users. It is merely a tool for comparing usage trends amongst different time periods (month to month, in this case).