OBU Year in Review 2025

The Watercooler
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Dear SuttaCentral Community,

When I last posted an update here about The Open Buddhist University in April of 2022, our website’s library had only (:face_with_hand_over_mouth:) 1483 items. Since then, we[1] have added 2942 additional items to our library, nearly trebling the size of our collection to well over four thousand pieces.

Given that it’s been a while, I thought I would[2] post a bit about how this year has gone over at OBU.

The Website Library

The main focus for our efforts this year was getting new library sections added for various “national” forms of Buddhism.

So, now, under the Mahāyāna / East Asian and Vajrayāna sections, you’ll find three new sections with content teaching about Buddhism in Japan, Korea, and Tibet.

And under the Theravada area of our library, you’ll now find subsections devoted to Thai, Sri Lankan, Cambodian, and Burmese Buddhism, in addition to the sections on The History of the Theravada and Abhidhamma which we launched last year.

With all that now done, our sections on the Religious Forms of Buddhism are now as rich as what we previously (the last couple years) worked on under the Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation sections of our library.

A big shout out here to JJM (our data entry volunteer) who has been doing much of the heavy lifting on this!

Google Drive

Our Google Drive Folder is where we organize all the items we plan on including in the website in the future.

While the website is rapidly catching up, our plans haven’t stood still! I’m still adding almost 1 new file to the Drive folder every day (on average) and the folder has grown more than 9 GB this year. It now contains 8781 files and weighs in at 105 GB.

A big anumodana here to the benefactor who stepped in to pay for our Google Drive subscription after my free .edu account closed in March.

Content Discovery

Our second main focus this year, however, was in expanding the number of journals that OBU tracks as we search for quality content to feature. Since last year, I’ve discovered and added 11 new open access journals to our collections:

The 11 Journals added in 2025

You can expect more quality content to be added from them in the years to come as we continue to carefully vet their back catalogs for articles that meet our strict inclusion criteria.

Impact and Web Traffic

Our links have started to show up in academic citations as well as various places around the web, but our main metric for success is how many people we serve.

On that front, Google Analytics reports[3] that over 36 thousand people have downloaded content from our website in the last 365 days: a 16% increase over 2024.

Almost all of that growth has been on the library side of the website, which now accounts for about 2/3rds of our content downloads. This makes some sense, as the library has expanded substantially this year, while our courses remain mostly unchanged (except for some minor additions to our “Buddhism as a Religion” course).

The biggest change in website traffic this year is of course AI. AI bots are now scraping my site heavily and are not driving much traffic to it. Bots run by Chinese firms, Amazon, Microsoft, etc now represent about half (!) of my site’s traffic while only about 1 active user gets referred per day from ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. Thankfully I don’t pay for my site’s bandwidth[4] and I am not trying to make money off inbound traffic. But the signs are not looking good for news sites who do!

Links to news sites

Indeed, this year many websites and podcasts which we linked to before because they used to be free, such as Vox.com and the NYT Podcasts, are now retreating behind paywalls and OBU has had to adapt, in some cases by linking to historical Archive.org versions and in some cases by removing those items entirely from our library.

Our top three referrers this year continue to be Google, Bing, and Reddit. So lastly, a many thanks to all the Redditers (and Facebook users, etc) who continue to share links to OBU with their networks! Your help spreading the word about our collections is a big part of why the site continues to grow and why I can justify spending the time on continuing to improve it.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement this year and wishing you all a very happy holidays and a wonderful 2026.

Sincerely, your librarian,
Khemarato Bhikkhu

  1. Me and a steadfast data-entry volunteer ↩︎

  2. Actually, @snowbird invited me to ↩︎

  3. an undercount, as some of our users opt out of GA tracking ↩︎

  4. Thank you, CloudFlare and GitHub for the free hosting! ↩︎

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Sadhu! Rejoicing in all your efforts and congratulations on the increase in popularity. OBU turns up often in my duck duck go searches

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You’re doing an inimitable, extraordinary work, Bhante. Sadhu for all the hard work and countless contributors that make this possible. :slight_smile:

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Aw, thanks! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: (… assuming you meant inimitable :sweat_smile: )

And, sorry, I almost forgot:

A big thank you to @Snowbird for his review of the Sri Lankan bibliography. He contributed helpful suggestions when I launched that section.

If anyone here is knowledgeable about one of the forms of Buddhism mentioned above and would like to review my work, I would sincerely appreciate any feedback at all about those national bibliographies and whether they are achieving their goal of giving a solid and balanced introduction to their respective traditions. I’ve tried my best, but am far from an expert, so your comments and suggestions would be most welcome! Thanks!

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Yes, that was a poor brain fart. :rofl:

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Sadhu :folded_hands: Sadhu :folded_hands: Sadhu :folded_hands:
Amazing :star_struck: Awesome :heart_eyes: Beautiful :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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