Sketchfab celebrates 5 years and 100 million visitors

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27 March 2017

Sketchfab just turned 5 years old! We started with a simple idea: let anyone publish and explore 3D on the web. 5 years later, with more than 800,000 community members who have published close to 1.5 million scenes, we are the largest 3D network in the world. This is an incredible validation that our initial idea was something people really wanted 🙂

5 years ago: 3 founders
and we are now a team of 30 people!

The 3D landscape and the web have evolved quite a bit since we started. Back in 2012, our community was mostly made of professional artists, and the web essentially meant the desktop web. Today, our vision is powered by 2 mega trends:

  • Everyone is becoming a 3D creator: with technologies like 3D capture coming to our smartphones, and tools like Tilt Brush or Medium letting you draw and sculpt in 3D space, anyone can capture the world in 3D or express themselves. This is great for beginners, but also empowers professional artists with better and faster workflows.
  • Everyone is becoming a 3D consumer: we are moving from the information age to the experience age, and this shift is powered by 3D. With the VR and AR headsets coming to market, everyone needs virtual versions of things, people, places… 3D is becoming a common media format, consumed at scale like images or videos. 3D on the web is not limited to desktop only, and now runs great on mobile, and even on VR headsets thanks to WebVR.

We are proud to be a cornerstone of this ecosystem, filling a much needed gap by providing tools to creators and content to visitors.

This week, we are also celebrating another important milestone: more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed 3D or VR content through Sketchfab. In total, Sketchfab 3D scenes have gathered close to half a billion views.

This traffic speaks to the astonishing work published by our community. Content that keeps getting better and better as we improve our technology and keep adding new features (VR, physically based rendering, animations…). But this is not only about fabulous content. Great content doesn’t matter if no one can discover or access it. That’s why we spend so much energy making sure our technology runs on every device, and your content can be shared and embedded everywhere, to reach the widest possible audience.

We want to thank you, our community, for bringing us here. There is no way we could have done this without you, and the technology and platform we are building is only as good as the incredible work we host. Check out the journey we took together:

To the billion!

About the author

Alban Denoyel

Co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab.

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