Question: I put [a package on PyPi](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/powerlaw) for the first time ~2 months ago, and have made some version updates since then. I noticed this week the download count recording, and was surprised to see it had been downloaded hundreds of times. Over the next few days, I was more surprised to see the download count increasing by sometimes hundreds *per day*, even though this is a niche statistical test toolbox. In particular, older versions of package are continuing to be downloaded, sometimes at higher rates than the newest version.

What is going on here?

Is there a bug in PyPi's downloaded counting, or is there an abundance of crawlers grabbing open source code (as mine is)?

Answer: 
You also have to take into account that virtualenv is getting more popular. If your package is something like a core library that people use in many of their projects, they will usually download it multiple times.

Consider a single user has 5 projects where he uses your package and each lives in its own virtualenv. Using pip to meet the requirements, your package is already downloaded 5 times this way. Then these projects might be set up on different machines, like work, home and laptop computers, in addition there might be a staging and a live server in case of a web application. Summing this up, you end up with many downloads by a single person.

Just a thought... perhaps your package is simply good. ;)
Hypothesis: CI tools like Travis CI and Appveyor also contribute quite a bit. It might mean that each commit/push leads to a build of a package and the installation of everything in requirements.txt