Thingiverse.com is the largest online platform for sharing models for 3d printing, and it continues to grow. Glad to see that the majority of models published are not simply toys :)

Out of curiosity, and as a learning exercise, I pulled the data from Thingiverse's REST API using Python. The code I used for doing this is available , if you want to check it out. I'm a total noob, and just downloaded everything locally on CSV files (would love to hear about better approaches, like creating a database or something more refined).

The image is from a post I wrote about the statistics of Thingiverse..

It shows the cumulative number of published models ("Things") on Thingiverse.com over time. On the left side, the growth of the total number of models. On the right, the same analysis for each of the 10 main categories.