The figures behind the set
Four things the full record makes visible, computed from the same snapshot the package pages are built from. All of them cover the79 packages npmpulse tracks rather than all of npm, which is a curated list of what people look up.
- 2015 against today — the same ten months, a decade apart, for every package that existed then
- Where the record begins — npm's first real day, and what the packages that arrive later looked like
- Fastest growing — the trailing year against the year before it, above a floor
Every figure is npm's own, published through its downloads API, and the records run from 2015-01-10 — though npm's real numbers begin on 2015-02-27, which the second page above is about. Snapshot of2026-10-13, covering through 2026-10-11.
Where these numbers come from
Download counts are npm's own, published through its downloads API. They count installs rather than people, so they include CI, mirrors and repeated installs, and a package pulled in as a dependency counts for that package too.
npm's API returns at most 549 days for a single package and 365 when several are compared, and truncates an over-long range rather than refusing it. npmpulse asks for the whole span in 365-day chunks and stitches the answers together, which is what makes a chart that starts in 2015 possible at all.
npm reports 0 for every package from 2015-01-10 until 2015-02-27, when its real records begin; those leading zeros are trimmed rather than charted. Individual days it lost entirely are interpolated, and the most recent day or two, which it has not finalised, is dropped. The monthly figures here are complete calendar months, so a package that started mid-month begins with the following one.
A handful of months are inflated in npm's own figures. svelte's 2022-11-23 records 5.0M downloads against a norm nearer 80K, and November 2022 is a spike in several packages at once; they are left alone here, because they are what the source says, but a one-month jump is treated as a spike rather than as a change of fortune. That is why the comparisons below only call a lead change a lead change when it held for a second month.
A package's record can also begin before the package did: npm names get reused. Where a first day is a handful of downloads, that is what you are looking at — the earlier life of the name rather than a slow launch. Where it is hundreds of thousands, the opposite is true, and what is missing is upstream history rather than usage.
Snapshot of 2026-10-13. Figures run through 2026-10-11.