An increase of one million submissions is growth, especially when you compare it to a loss of 6000. (On 23 July 2008, VCL's artist summary page showed 4663 artist/authors, 320221 images, 5380 other files. Today, it shows 4574, 313729 and 4994 respectively.)
As can be seen from the sudden jumps in data, Alexa is - alas - not a perfect tool for site measurement, but both compete.com and quantcast (compare with vclart.net, yiffstar.com) suggest the VCL is losing traffic and FA is gaining it, though they offer differing assessments of Yiffstar/SoFurry.
An increase of one million submissions is growth, especially when you compare it to a loss of 6000. (On 23 July 2008, VCL's artist summary page showed 4663 artist/authors, 320221 images, 5380 other files. Today, it shows 4574, 313729 and 4994 respectively.)
They've also grown in the sense of increasing rate of new submissions. Over the last year for which monthly stats are available: September: 75984 - October: 77461 - November: 77616 - December: 84928 - January: 96738 - February: 89926 - March: 95616 - April: 91822 - May: 97155 - June: 107450 - July: 127916 - August: 128832
The site passed 500,000 submissions on 15-16 April 2007, about two years in. They passed the 2,500,000th submission on 10 July 2009, just over two years later. The most recent submission number is 3,286,619.
As can be seen from the sudden jumps in data, Alexa is - alas - not a perfect tool for site measurement, but both compete.com and quantcast (compare with vclart.net, yiffstar.com) suggest the VCL is losing traffic and FA is gaining it, though they offer differing assessments of Yiffstar/SoFurry.