This page collects community-led growth statistics from primary sources: Reddit's and Figma's filings, trust surveys from Edelman and Nielsen, B2B buying research from G2 and TrustRadius, the CMX industry survey, Higher Logic's participation benchmark and one peer-reviewed study that controlled for self-selection. Vendor data is labelled as vendor data. Every number links to its original publisher, and the rest of the series sits on the marketing statistics hub. Cite freely with a link.
Community-led growth statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | Reddit averaged 130.3 million daily active uniques in Q3 2026, up 12%, and 515.2 million weekly active uniques, up 16% | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Scale | 77% of Reddit's year-over-year daily user growth came from logged-out visitors (11.0M of 14.3M) | Reddit Q3 2026 (computed) |
| Scale | 26% of US adults use Reddit, rising to 48% of adults aged 18 to 29 | Pew Research Center, November 2025 |
| Scale | Discord says it has more than 90 million daily active users, citing its own internal data for Q4 2025 (company claim, no filing) | Discord, 2026 |
| Scale | More than 225 million developers use GitHub, and public contributions reached 2.5 billion in a year | GitHub Octoverse, October 2026 |
| Trust | 64% of people across 28 countries trust their neighbors to do what is right | Edelman Trust Barometer, January 2026 |
| Trust | 89% of US consumers name recommendations from people they know as the most trusted form of advertising (dated) | Nielsen, 2021 |
| B2B buying | Review sites, colleagues and independent forums together took 31.6% of B2B shortlist influence, against 17.1% for AI chatbots | G2, 2025 (computed) |
| B2B buying | 74% of technology buyers use reviews to inform purchase decisions | TrustRadius, July 2026 |
| Teams | 17% of community professionals (298 answering) have nobody working on community full time, up from 8% in 2022 | CMX, August 2025 |
| ROI | 24% of community professionals (243 answering) can confidently quantify their community's monetary value | CMX, August 2025 |
| Revenue | Customers who joined a North American media retailer's online community spent 19% more after launch, estimated against non-joiners with a difference-in-differences design (dated) | Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah, Marketing Science, 2015 |
| Participation | The average association community had 563 monthly unique logins and 68 monthly unique contributors (vendor data) | Higher Logic, 2025 |
| Formats | 65% of community professionals hosted in-person events in 2025, up from 29% in 2022 | CMX, August 2025 |
Where do online communities live, and how big are they?
Reddit is the largest open community platform that reports user numbers in public filings, with 130.3 million daily active uniques in Q3 2026, while Discord reports more than 90 million daily users and GitHub more than 225 million developers.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Reddit averaged 130.3 million daily active uniques (DAUq) in the quarter ended 30 September 2026, up 12% from 116.0 million a year earlier and level with the 130.3 million of Q2 2026 (Q2 release). | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Reddit's weekly active uniques reached 515.2 million in Q3 2026, up 16% from 443.8 million; US weekly uniques were 188.5 million, against 187.8 million a year earlier. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Logged-out daily uniques grew 17% to 76.8 million in Q3 2026, while logged-in daily uniques grew 7% to 53.5 million. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Reddit's international daily uniques grew 24% to 79.6 million in Q3 2026; US daily uniques fell 2% to 50.7 million. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Logged-in US daily uniques, the core of Reddit's posting community, grew 1% year over year, from 23.1 million to 23.4 million. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Logged-out US daily uniques fell 4% to 27.3 million in Q3 2026, from 28.5 million, while international logged-out daily uniques grew 33% to 49.5 million. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Reddit told shareholders that its search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3 2026, with the decline accelerating late in the quarter and the biggest impact on logged-out and web traffic. | Reddit Q3 2026 shareholder letter, October 2026 |
| Reddit's Q3 2026 revenue was $895 million, up 53%, on a base of more than 27 billion posts and comments. | Reddit Q3 2026 results, October 2026 |
| Reddit ranked as the most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews in a US analysis of 30 million cited sources in March 2026, ahead of YouTube, LinkedIn and Wikipedia; G2 ranked sixth. Peec sells AI visibility software and publishes ranks, not shares. | Peec AI, March 2026 |
| 26% of US adults say they ever use Reddit, including 48% of those aged 18 to 29 and 6% of those 65 and older, from a survey of 5,022 adults fielded 5 February to 18 June 2025. | Pew Research Center, November 2025 |
| 32% of US adults use WhatsApp, the chat app that 21% of community teams now use as a hosting platform (CMX, 2025), from the same 2025 Pew survey. | Pew Research Center, November 2025 |
| Discord reports more than 90 million daily active users as of Q4 2025 (internal data), and says more than 90% of its users play video games (2025 user survey). | Discord company page, 2026 |
| More than 225 million developers use GitHub in the Octoverse 2026 year (1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026); the United States (38.3 million) and India (32.0 million) each added more than 10 million. The 2025 edition counted 180 million. | GitHub Octoverse, October 2026 |
| Developers made 2.5 billion public contributions on GitHub in the 2026 Octoverse year, up from 1.12 billion. | GitHub Octoverse, October 2026 |
| March 2025 set a record of 255,000 first-time open source contributors on GitHub. | GitHub Octoverse, October 2025 |
| Among 10,741 developers who answered the community question in Stack Overflow's 2026 survey (30,903 responses, 169 countries), 69.5% used public GitHub projects, 68.6% Stack Overflow, 58.4% YouTube, 53.8% Reddit, 33.4% Discord and 8.6% company-sponsored forums. The 2025 survey had Stack Overflow at 84.2%. | Stack Overflow Developer Survey, October 2026 |
| 82% of developers in the 2025 survey visited Stack Overflow at least a few times a month, and 25% daily or more often. | Stack Overflow Developer Survey, July 2025 |
| 64.1% of developers say AI means they visit Stack Overflow less for simple questions, against 15.9% who visit more to verify answers (16,985 answering, 2026). | Stack Overflow Developer Survey, October 2026 |
Reddit's logged-in US audience grew 1% in a year while logged-out readers grew 17% worldwide. The growth in community is readers, most likely arriving from search and AI answers, and very few of them ever post. Q3 2026 also showed how fragile that traffic is: Reddit said search referrals fell meaningfully, and US logged-out users dropped 4%. A community thread is now content that strangers read while choosing a product, so plan for the reader first and don't assume Google keeps sending them.
Discord's number deserves a caveat. Discord is a private company, and its 90 million daily users figure is internal data that no public filing has yet confirmed. Scale is only half the story, though; the other half is whether people believe what they read there.
How much do people trust peers compared with brands and institutions?
People trust their neighbors more than business leaders: 64% trust "my neighbors" to do what is right across 28 countries in the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, and 89% of US consumers named recommendations from people they know as the most trusted form of advertising in Nielsen's 2021 study.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 70% of people worldwide have an insular trust mindset, meaning they are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, facts or cultural background, from 33,938 online interviews in 28 countries fielded 25 October to 16 November 2025. | Edelman Trust Barometer, January 2026 |
| 89% of US respondents named recommendations from people they know as the most trusted advertising channel, from an online survey of adults 15 and older. Dated: 2021 fieldwork. | Nielsen Trust in Advertising, US highlights, 2021 |
Edelman calls this insularity and treats it as a problem for society, and it is. For a marketer it is also a map. Trust has moved into small circles of people who look like you, and a brand community is the one place a company can sit inside such a circle instead of shouting at it from outside. Just don't confuse the two. Edelman measured trust in neighbors, which your Slack group has to earn separately, and the Nielsen figure is five years old with no newer edition in public.
What the trust surveys cannot tell you is whether that peer trust shows up in a real purchase decision. B2B buying research gets closer.
How much do peers and communities shape B2B software buying?
Other buyers shape about a third of B2B software shortlists: software review sites, peers and independent forums together took 31.6% of shortlist influence in G2's April 2025 survey of 1,169 B2B decision makers, against 17.1% for generative AI chatbots.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Sources that most influenced vendor shortlists: GenAI chatbots 17.1%, software review sites 15.1%, vendor sites 12.8%, market research firms 10.6%, independent content 9.7%, peers and colleagues 8.9%, vendor salespeople 8.8%, independent forums 7.6%. | G2 Buyer Behavior Report, May 2025 |
| G2 found generative AI chatbots were cited as twice as influential on shortlists as both vendor salespeople and independent forums like Reddit. | G2 Buyer Behavior Report, May 2025 |
| Nearly two out of three software buyers now prefer to engage vendor salespeople only in the later stages of the buying journey, up 17 percentage points in a year. | G2 Buyer Behavior Report, May 2025 |
| 45% of B2B software buyers say citations of software review sites are what make an AI chatbot's answer most trustworthy, from 1,076 buyers surveyed in March 2026. | G2 via PR Newswire, April 2026 |
| 74% of technology buyers use reviews to inform their purchase decisions, from a January 2026 survey of 1,862 buyers and 444 vendors. | TrustRadius, 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect, July 2026 |
| Only 13% of technology buyers used analyst reports to make their purchase decision in 2026, a 63% decline since 2022. | TrustRadius, July 2026 |
All of this happens before a vendor hears about it: buyers make first contact 61% of the way through the journey in 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report. The dark funnel statistics page covers the peer conversations and private channels that fill that gap, including G2's July 2026 edition, which asks a different question and shows review sites and chatbots roughly level, so read the 2025 gap below as one year's snapshot.
Independent forums at 7.6% looks small until you remember that G2's shares add up to 100%, so every source competes for the same slice of attention. Add review sites and colleagues and other buyers beat the chatbots by nearly two to one. And the chatbots are not a separate channel: 45% of buyers trust an AI answer more when it cites a review site, so the peer layer now reaches buyers twice, once directly and once through the model.
That influence explains why companies keep funding community-led growth programmes, even when the teams can't say what they return. The next section shows how thin that funding is.
How are companies staffing and funding community teams?
Community-led growth runs on thin teams whose remit keeps growing: 17% of the 298 community professionals who answered CMX's 2025 team-size question said nobody at their organisation works on community full time, up from 8% in 2022 and 4% in 2021. CMX is owned by Bevy, which sells community software, so read its survey as vendor data.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 17% of community professionals report no full-time community staff, the highest share CMX has recorded; one-person teams make up about 30% and 2 to 5 people (34%) is the most common team size. 298 answered this question in a survey of 589 professionals, 1 May to 22 June 2025. | CMX Community Industry Trends Report, August 2025 |
| 26% of community professionals saw a budget increase in 2025, 18% saw cuts, 31% said it stayed the same and 25% did not know how their budget had changed, from 257 respondents who opted into the budget section. | CMX, August 2025 |
| Marketing houses 31% of community teams; customer success houses 19%, up from 8% in 2022; standalone community departments fell from 22% to 17%. | CMX, August 2025 |
| US marketing leaders spend a mean 14.25% of their marketing budget on social media and expect 17.06% within 12 months, from 163 answers in a survey of 308 leaders fielded 7 to 29 January 2026. The survey does not break out community. | The CMO Survey, 2026 |
| 79% of respondents at pre-seed to Series A companies and 95% at Series B or later said their company had a community team. Commsor itself warns its 250+ respondents came from its own network. Dated: 2022 vendor survey. | Commsor, The 2022 Community-Led Report |
A quarter of the people who opted into CMX's budget questions don't know what happened to their own budget. That tells you community usually lives as a line inside someone else's plan, most often marketing's. No public survey I trust reports community as a share of the marketing budget; The CMO Survey tracks social media and stops there. Treat any "companies spend X% on community" figure you see elsewhere with suspicion, and read the Commsor 95% as a portrait of who answered the survey.
The move toward customer success matters for the next question, because a team measured on retention needs different proof than a team measured on pipeline.
Can community teams prove revenue and ROI?
Only 24% of the 243 community professionals who answered CMX's 2025 value question can confidently quantify their community's monetary value, and 36% of those 59 people report $1 million or more in value over the previous 12 months.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 24% of community professionals said "yes, I can confidently quantify the value" of their community in 2025 (243 answering, up from 16% in 2024), a record for the CMX survey; the rest called it a work in progress or said not yet. | CMX, August 2025 |
| Of the 59 respondents who could quantify value, the only people CMX asked this follow-up, 24% put it at $1 million to $4.9 million and 12% at $5 million or more for the past 12 months. | CMX, August 2025 |
| Teams whose CRM connects community and customer data rated their community "extremely successful" at business goals 24% of the time, against 11% for teams with an unconnected CRM. 69% of teams have a CRM, and just under half of those connect it. | CMX, August 2025 |
| Among teams whose primary objective is customer retention, 72% measure customer retention, 49% customer satisfaction and 47% active users; 238 respondents answered the metrics question across all objectives. | CMX, August 2025 |
Put the two CMX numbers together and you get the honest state of community ROI: 36% of the 24% who can quantify value claim seven figures, which is about 1 in 12 of the 243 people who answered, or roughly 21 self-reported claims. The CRM finding is the useful part. Teams that join community data to customer records may be no better at community. They are better at showing it, and showing it is what keeps the budget. If you run a community today and your member IDs don't match your CRM IDs, fix that before you run another event.
Self-reported value is one thing. Whether the community changes customer behaviour is a harder question, and the next section is where most vendor claims fall apart.
Do community members really retain and spend more?
Community members spend more, but the best controlled estimate is modest: a 2015 Marketing Science study by Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah found customers who joined a North American entertainment retailer's online community spent $127.01 more over 15 months, about 19% of their post-launch spending, estimated against non-joiners.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Customers who joined a multichannel entertainment retailer's online community generated "social dollars" of $127.01 over a 15-month window, about $102 a year, or 19% of post-launch expenditure, using a difference-in-differences design against non-joiners; a kernel matching check gave about 21%. Dated: community launched September 2007, published 2015. | Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah, Marketing Science 34(3), 2015 |
| In the same study, members who posted content and members with more social ties inside the community generated more social dollars than lurkers and members with few ties. | Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah, 2015 |
Almost every "community members retain 2x better" chart you'll see comes from a vendor that sells community software, and almost all of them compare members with non-members. Most of that gap is self-selection: engaged customers join communities, and that's why they're in the chart. The Marketing Science paper is the rare study that tried to strip that out, and it still found a lift, but 19% is a long way from the 50% to 100% numbers in sales decks. Use 19% as your ceiling for planning until you've run your own holdout test.
The paper also found that posters drove more of the effect than lurkers. That sits awkwardly next to Reddit's numbers, where lurkers are the growth, and it's why format choices matter.
Which community formats and platforms are growing in 2026?
In-person events and AI tools are the fastest-growing parts of community work: 65% of community professionals hosted in-person events in 2025, up from 29% in 2022 (CMX), and 93% now use AI tools, up from 81% a year earlier (CMX, 2026).
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 65% of community professionals hosted in-person events in 2025, up from 29% in 2022. | CMX, August 2025 |
| Slack fell from 28% to 20% of community hosting platforms and lost the top spot for the first time in CMX's history; WhatsApp held at 21% after 8% in 2023. | CMX, August 2025 |
| 93% of community professionals use AI tools in the seventh annual CMX report, up from 81% the year before. CMX does not state the sample on the report page, and the full report is gated. | CMX Community Industry Report, 2026 |
| 76% of community builders rely on social media as their top growth channel, from a 2025 survey of more than 1,200 builders by Circle, which sells community software; Circle does not publish the fielding dates. | Circle, 2025 Community Trends Report |
| 54% of community builders run paid memberships and 48% host in-person events, in the same Circle vendor survey. | Circle, 2025 Community Trends Report |
The shift from Slack to WhatsApp and to rooms with chairs in them says the same thing: members want the community where they already are, and they want faces. The Circle number is the uncomfortable one. Three in four community builders still depend on social platforms to find new members, so most communities grow on rented land even when they're hosted on owned software, a point the B2B social media statistics page backs up from the platform side.
Social reach brings people in. Whether they ever say anything once they arrive is a separate question, covered next.
How many community members actually post or contribute?
Most community members read and never post: the average association community in Higher Logic's 2025 benchmark had 563 monthly unique logins but only 68 monthly unique contributors, from anonymised data on nearly 1,500 associations between June 2024 and May 2025. Higher Logic sells community software, so treat the figures as vendor data.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| The average association community had 69,982 user accounts, against a median of 12,040; 9,300 users (13%) showed activity in the previous 120 days. | Higher Logic, 2025 Association Community Benchmark Report |
| Average monthly unique logins were 563 and monthly unique contributors 68; Higher Logic puts contributors at 6% of the average monthly login base. | Higher Logic, 2025 |
| Community digest emails opened at 44% to 56%, against an industry email benchmark of 35.64%. | Higher Logic, 2025 |
| When developers hit a problem, 82.7% search online first and 69.9% ask an AI agent; 28.8% message someone they trust, 14.8% post in a private group and 8.0% post in a public forum (16,664 answering, top three choices). | Stack Overflow Developer Survey, October 2026 |
| Figma users had created more than 250,000 Community resources, including more than 10,000 plugins and widgets, by the time of Figma's July 2025 IPO prospectus. | Figma, Form 424B4 prospectus, July 2025 |
| More than 200 Friends of Figma chapters organised more than 650 events in 2024, according to the same prospectus. | Figma, Form 424B4 prospectus, July 2025 |
Divide Higher Logic's two averages and roughly one in eight monthly visitors contributes, which is a better ratio than most community managers fear. The Stack Overflow number is the warning: only 8% of developers post in a public forum first, and AI agents now take the questions that used to start threads. Figma shows what the posting minority can build when the product gives them something to make. 250,000 templates and plugins is a growth asset no marketing team could have produced, and it's the strongest case I know for designing your community around creators, not commenters.
The arithmetic behind the three original numbers comes next, so you can rerun it with your own inputs.
How we calculated the original numbers
Three figures on this page do not appear anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or swap the inputs.
- 77% of Reddit's daily-user growth came from logged-out visitors. Reddit reports average daily active uniques (DAUq). Its Q3 2026 release, for the three months ended 30 September, shows global DAUq of 130.3 million against 116.0 million in Q3 2025, a gain of 14.3 million. Logged-out DAUq rose from 65.8 million to 76.8 million, a gain of 11.0 million. 11.0 / 14.3 = 76.9%. Logged-out users are also 58.9% of all daily uniques (76.8 / 130.3). Both inputs come from the same table in the same filing. This figure replaces the 83% we published from the Q2 2026 release in September; the share fell as US logged-out traffic declined.
- 31.6%: other buyers' share of B2B shortlist influence. G2's April 2025 survey asked 1,169 B2B decision makers which external sources shaped their vendor shortlist. The shares in G2's chart sum to 100% (100.1% with rounding), so they split one total and can be added. Software review sites (15.1%) + peers and colleagues (8.9%) + independent forums (7.6%) = 31.6%. GenAI chatbots took 17.1%, so peer sources outweigh chatbots 1.85 to 1, and outweigh vendor salespeople (8.8%) 3.6 to 1.
- About 1 in 12: community professionals who can confidently claim $1 million or more in value. In CMX 2025, 24% of the 243 people who answered the value question said they can confidently quantify their community's value. CMX asked only that 24% (59 people) how much value it produced, and 36% of those 59 (24% at $1 million to $4.9 million plus 12% at $5 million or more) reported seven figures. 36% of the 24% is 0.24 x 0.36 = 0.086, or 8.6% of the 243, about 21 people. The figures are self-reported and the 36% rests on 59 answers, so treat this as an order of magnitude.
What the 2026 numbers say
Community-led growth is mostly a reader story now. Reddit's growth is logged-out and international, while its logged-in US core grew 1%. A community strategy built around posting and member counts misses the 59% of the audience that reads and leaves, and Higher Logic's benchmark shows the same split inside owned communities. Write threads, answers and docs that a stranger can use in 30 seconds.
Peer trust is real, and it is concentrated. Edelman found 64% trust their neighbors, and other buyers beat AI chatbots on B2B shortlists by almost two to one. None of that proves your community drives revenue. It proves the channel your community sits in is the one buyers believe.
Proof is the bottleneck. Only 24% of teams can quantify value, a quarter don't know their own budget, and the one controlled study puts the spending lift at 19%. The teams that connect community data to the CRM report twice the success. In 2027 the community budget will go to whoever can show a holdout test, and it will be smaller than the vendor decks promised.
FAQ
How much do B2B buyers rely on peers and communities?
31.6% of B2B software buyers named review sites, colleagues or independent forums as the top influence on their shortlist, from our sum of G2's April 2025 survey of 1,169 decision makers. That's nearly twice the 17.1% who named AI chatbots, and 74% of technology buyers use reviews at some point in the purchase (TrustRadius, 2026).
Do community members have higher retention?
19% is the best controlled estimate of the spending lift, from a 2015 Marketing Science study that compared community joiners with non-joiners at a North American media retailer. Vendor charts showing members retaining twice as well usually skip that control, so they mostly measure customers who were loyal before joining.
How many companies can measure community ROI?
24% of the 243 community professionals who answered CMX's 2025 value question can confidently quantify their community's monetary value. About 1 in 12 of those 243 (36% of the 59 who could quantify) claim $1 million or more. Teams with a CRM connected to community data rate themselves extremely successful twice as often (24% against 11%).
How big is Reddit in 2026?
130.3 million daily active uniques and 515.2 million weekly active uniques in Q3 2026, according to Reddit's quarterly results. 77% of the year's daily-user growth came from logged-out visitors, and 26% of US adults say they use Reddit (Pew, 2025).
Do people trust peers more than brands?
64% of people across 28 countries trust their neighbors to do what is right in the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. Nielsen's 2021 study found 89% of US consumers named recommendations from people they know as the most trusted form of advertising.
Which department owns community teams?
31% of community teams sit in marketing, according to CMX's 2025 report, with customer success second at 19%, up from 8% in 2022. Standalone community departments fell from 22% to 17% over the same period.
How many community members actually post?
68 monthly unique contributors against 563 monthly unique logins was the average association community in Higher Logic's 2025 benchmark of nearly 1,500 associations. Higher Logic puts contributors at 6% of monthly logins. In Stack Overflow's 2026 survey, only 8.0% of developers post in a public forum when they need an answer.
Sources
- Reddit, Inc., Reddit Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results (Exhibit 99.1) (July 2026)
- Reddit, Inc., Reddit Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results (Exhibit 99.1) (October 2026)
- Reddit, Inc., Q3 2026 Letter to Shareholders (Exhibit 99.2) (October 2026)
- Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet (November 2025, 5,022 US adults)
- Discord, Company page (Q4 2025 data, accessed September 2026)
- GitHub, Octoverse 2025 (October 2025, updated February 2026)
- Stack Overflow, 2025 Developer Survey (July 2025, 49,000+ responses)
- Edelman, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer (January 2026, 33,938 respondents in 28 countries)
- Nielsen, Trust in Advertising Study, US highlights (2021)
- G2, Buyer Behavior Report 2025 (May 2025, 1,169 decision makers surveyed April 2025)
- G2 via PR Newswire, Half of B2B Software Buyers Now Start Their Research With AI Chatbots (April 2026, 1,076 buyers surveyed March 2026)
- TrustRadius, 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report (July 2026, 1,862 buyers surveyed January 2026)
- 6sense, The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025 (November 2025)
- CMX, The 2025 Community Industry Trends Report (August 2025, 589 professionals)
- CMX, The 2026 Community Industry Report (2026)
- The CMO Survey, Topline Report 2026 (2026, fielded January 2026)
- Circle, The 2025 Community Trends Report (2025, vendor survey of 1,200+ builders)
- Manchanda, Packard and Pattabhiramaiah, Social Dollars, Marketing Science 34(3) (2015)
- Commsor, The 2022 Community-Led Report (January 2022, 250+ respondents)
- GitHub, Octoverse 2026 (October 2026, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026)
- Stack Overflow, 2026 Developer Survey, Community (October 2026, 30,903 responses in 169 countries)
- Figma, Inc., Form 424B4 prospectus (July 2025)
- Peec AI, Most-cited domains in AI search (March 2026, 30 million cited sources, US)
- Higher Logic, The 2025 Association Community Benchmark Report (2025, data June 2024 to May 2025, nearly 1,500 associations)
Methodology. These community-led growth statistics were collected in September 2026, refreshed in November 2026 with Reddit's Q3 2026 filing, Stack Overflow's 2026 survey and GitHub's 2026 Octoverse, and checked against the original publisher's page, filing or PDF, not against statistics roundups. Market-size figures were left out because the only sources for them are market-report resellers. Vendor data from companies that sell community or AI visibility software (Circle, Commsor, Higher Logic, Peec AI, and CMX, which is owned by Bevy) is labelled and shown with its sample. Retention and spending claims without a control group were excluded, which is why the page relies on one 2015 study. Discord's user figure is a company claim pending a public filing. Last updated 1 November 2026.