3D printing is taking off, if one believes the signals seen this year. Another milestone was reached last week by popular repository Thingiverse, who declared they now have over 100,000 3D models available.
Thingiverse also released several interesting statistics. Apparently the number of models rose by 20,000 in just the past month. At this rate of increase the site will hit a million 3D models in a year or two. They also say they’ve had over 21M downloads.
When launching a 3D model repository the first challenge is simply to attract enough 3D models to make the site popular. Thingiverse now must move on to the second challenge: searching and categorization. When there are so many models, how will visitors find what they want?
Via Thingiverse
But how many of those 100,000 models are worthless variations of the lithopane and the pen thingies? Since the introduction of the Thingiverse customizer there's been a boost in 3D model uploads, sure, but most are endless repeats of the same few models. Out of those 20,000 new items in the past month, I'd wager less than 1000 are truly original and interesting, and I'm being very generous. I'm checking "New and noteworthy" everyday or so that's how I know.
I agree with the fifth comment in the linked blog post. Customized items are polluting the repository.