# What 14 Years of a Code-Download Site Taught Us About Demand in the AI Era > Source: > Published: 2026-07-26 08:52:50+00:00 I run **Zuidaima** (“Most Code”), a Chinese source-code sharing site that launched in 2012. At its peak it felt like a small economy: upload code, earn points, spend points to download, cash out points. About **537k registered users**, nearly **10k shared projects**, and millions of behavioral events later, search traffic dried up—and so did uploads. Recently I finally sat down with the production data (registrations, views, downloads, completed payments through mid‑2026) to answer a question I’d been avoiding: **Do people still want downloadable student/side-project code—or did AI make that whole category irrelevant?** Short answer: **demand didn’t vanish. It got thinner, more seasonal, and more about “can I ship/demo this?” than “can I download a zip?”** Annual new registrations (selected years): | Year | New users | vs 2018 peak | |---|---|---| | 2018 | 87,578 | 100% | | 2020 | 48,114 | 55% | | 2022 | 30,566 | 35% | | 2024 | 7,776 | 9% | | 2025 | 2,124 | 2.4% | Completed real-money top-ups (unique users who finished WeChat Pay, not just opened a QR code): Same story for views and downloads. This isn’t a cliff; it’s a long decline. Seasonality is still real—June 2024 spiked vs Aug/Sep, classic graduation / coursework season in China. If you operate a niche learning marketplace, this pattern may look familiar: **SEO-fed UGC economies shrink when the search pipe shrinks.** | Step | Users | % of signups | |---|---|---| | Viewed a project | 117,030 | 78.5% | | Downloaded code | 54,837 | 36.8% | | Paid download (spent points on priced projects) | 52,640 | 35.3% | Completed cash top-up | 11,088 | 7.4% | | Uploaded a shared project | 619 authors | 0.4% | How I read this: `status=0` ). Counting every payment intent as revenue would inflate payers by ~3–4×.Later cohorts are colder: Top paid downloads are still flooded with: Price band: mostly **1–5 points**. High volume, low willingness-to-pay for *code itself*. This layer is exactly what AI coding tools commoditize first. What looks closer to “someone will top up for this”: Typical prices: **9–15 points**, sometimes more. Keywords that keep showing up: **admin, management, student, mall, Spring Boot, Vue**. **Users aren’t shopping for the frontier. They’re shopping for something they can present.** One-line product thesis from the data: Use cheap templates for acquisition; make money on runnable, documentable full systems. If you “modernize,” amplify Track B—don’t invent another Track A. New shared projects / distinct authors: | Year | Projects | Authors | |---|---|---| | 2017 | 1,113 | 655 | | 2020 | 669 | 317 | | 2023 | 171 | 91 | | 2025 | 15 | 14 | Among post‑2020 signups, only ~619 people ever became authors. Classic death spiral: less traffic → fewer downloads/top-ups → creators stop earning → uploads stop → catalog ages → SEO and conversion get worse. Ironically, paid charts still feature years-old HTML/JSP/early Spring Boot repos. **The inventory still prints some cash. The factory floor is empty.** Among 2024+ new-user views, a **troubleshooting blog post** about importing/running downloaded Java projects ranks near the top—above many source packages. That single ranking told me more than a dozen brainstorms: The old loop was beautiful in its simplicity: share → earn points → spend points → withdraw. It worked when search brought endless students and creators could see money move. What’s broken now isn’t mainly the loop—it’s **distribution**, **delivery** (still “here’s a zip”), and **creator incentives**. The data doesn’t say “shut it down.” It says: **Evolve from a code download site into a coursework-grade app delivery surface—previewable, explainable, and help-to-run.** Keep the points economy if it still clears. Put AI in the middle as infrastructure, not as a chatbot sticker on a dying homepage. If you run an aging developer community or digital goods marketplace, ask yourself the same question our charts forced on us: **Are your users buying files—or buying a result they can show on Friday?** I’d love comments from folks running Gumroad-style code packs, course marketplaces, or any UGC site that peaked on SEO. What does your view→pay funnel look like in 2025–2026?