Every April, the FRED Blog dons its party hat and celebrates FRED’s birthday. This year, FRED turns the big 3-0. In lieu of a cake with candles, we present…what else? A data graph!

The scatter plot graph above shows the number of data series (in thousands) accessible through the FRED website and the number of persons visiting the website (in millions) for every year between 2009 and 2020. We’re sorry we can’t show you data all the way back to 1991, when FRED was born. The source of the data on website visitors is Google Analytics and Google didn’t even exist back then.

The graph tells a story of remarkable growth. In just the past 11 years, FRED has added roughly 756,000 series to its database and attracted more than 8 million new users to its website. The public appetite for data is strong, so here’s our toast to the next 30 years of FRED: May the correlation between data series and website visits remain positive and close to one!

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo, Maria Arias, and Keith Taylor.