2018 By the Numbers

Fun Facts 2018

Joining the grand tradition of book-keeping and badinage to start off the new year, we have some fun Octofacts from 2018! We spend most of the year intent on maintaining and improving the site from an engineering and product team perspective, and it’s nice to take a step back from that and see what we can see.

How’d we do it?

Because we have users all over the world, we document events on the site all in UTC, to keep a consistent chronology across them. That, however, makes it really hard to map local human concepts like “workday” in a parseable way. On the bright side, we know what country a click happened in, so surely we can just undo that neat standardization with some sweet localization! That’s some pretty straightforward science, right? Yes indeed! And it works fine (plus or minus a little manual finessing on those country encodings).

Sadly, not every country is a conveniently-sized Liechtenstein. While there are a bunch of countries that fit nicely into a single time zone, we have a fair number that don’t. In these cases, we turn to the art side of things. And by that, I mean looking at and interpreting images. In this case, those images were graphs of activity at different times of day, aligning those known quantities (the Liechtensteins) to see a rough picture of when humans do things on Octopart. Then, I moved the ambiguous countries’ timestamps so that their centers of gravity fell in similar waves. Once they looked like they made sense, I chose some spans of time to be indicative of certain things, like lunchtime.

Is this glossing over some things? Yes. We could do more to make our users’ locations visible, but we don’t need to do that for our business purposes, so we choose not to be any more granular than at the national level. The following stats are meant to be fun and approximate, while still based on enough reality to be interesting.

Findings

By Region

• Country with Most Night-Owls on Octopart is Poland, with 10.23% of their users in 2018 showing up to links to parts between the hours of 23:00 and 03:00, local time.

• Poland, Great Britain, and the Czech Republic are tied for Most Working Lunches, with 40% of their users clicking during local lunchtimes (between noon and 2 p.m.)

• the Czech Republic is the loudest region, with the biggest chunk of clicks going to Amplifiers - Audio (of all countries’ chunks dedicated to this category)

• Russia leads in punctuality, with the highest percentage of clicks by country dedicated to Clock and Timing (0.22%), though it is chased by South Korea (0.18%) and both Germany and Austria (0.15%).

(I know what you’re thinking: Switzerland was only 0.13%!)

• Germany is the leading contributor to the global shortage, with 5.23% of its clicks going to Ceramic Capacitors.

(I know that’s neither particularly German nor a capacitor, but frankly, I stopped looking once I found it.)

• Switzerland wins Best Lit (or Lighted, as you like), with 1.62% of its clicks going to LEDs.

• Switzerland is also our most logical country, with 0.89% of its clicks going to Logic Gates. (edited)

• South Korea wins our “Vive la Resistance” achievement for leading the field in terms of percentage of clicks on Resistors (0.59%).

(We hope you’re using them toward a working lightsaber!)

• Sweden is our most elephantine region, with the largest chunk of clicks dedicated to Memory (1.14%)

• Mexico wins “Best Wind Section” for having the largest chunk of clicks for Fans and Blowers (0.53%)

• The Netherlands is our most New Age region, with the largest chunk of clicks going to Crystals (0.72%)

(We’re not saying that’s what you’re doing with them, Dutch friends, but we’re hopeful!)

• The Czech Republic unlocked our “Robots in Disguise” achievement for having the largest proportion of clicks for Transformers

• Australia and Turkey are tied for Most Ticklish, with 0.27% of their clicks going to Pressure Sensors

• The US wins 🤘🏻for most clicks to Rocker Switches

• Switzerland wins the Heimlich Award for having the most clicks toward Common Mode Chokes (0.48%)

• Brazil wins our “Get a Room” award for the largest proportional contribution to Graphic Displays

• I would have loved Mexico to lead in Standoffs, but instead it’s the Netherlands. Is a “Dutch Standoff” a thing?

• Malaysia is our most eagle-eyed region, with the largest proportion of Optical Sensors

• Turkey is our sharkiest :shark: region, leading in click proportion to Current Sensors.

• Mexico is Most Manual, leading in Hand Tools.

• Australia is Chattiest, with most clicks toward Microphones

• Poland is Most Secretive, with the largest chunk toward Encoders

• Great Britain and Germany tie for Most Hipster, with the only appearances in our least-popular category, Linear ICs

• Aaaaand Australia cares least about the New Year, with the largest chunk of clickers on New Year’s Day. (only 0.15%, but still)

• India wins “Hidden Gems” for having the largest proportion of clicks for results ranked 6+

By Time

• The loudest local time of day is 15:00, with 12.6% of Amplifiers - Audio clickers, beating out the second-loudest hour, 11:00 a.m. at 11.91%

(Not surprisingly, Microphones do well just when Amplifiers - Audio do (15:00))

• Crystals, on the other hand, surge in popularity at 14:00.

• Real Time Clocks pick up at 15:00, though Clock and Timing’s moment is at 14:00.

• Freeze Tag hour is 11:00, when Motion Sensors are most clicked.

• Terminator hour is high noon, when Photoelectric Sensors are most clicked

• Rain in Spain time is noon, when Temperature and Humidity Sensors peak (for region='ES')

• Twogetherness Time is 14:00, when Proximity Sensors enjoy their greatest popularity.

(But with a machine talking, and more precise measurement)

• Octopart Shark Week started on May 21st, 2018, when Current Sensors peaked for the year.

From Amplifiers to Zener Diodes, Afghanistan (AF) to Zimbabwe (ZW), that’s 2018 on Octopart. We wish you sensitive sensors, transformative transformers, and luminous LEDs in the coming year, and we’re here to help you find them!