In former days project hosting sites like sourceforge.org provided detailled (download) statistics for every project. This was helpful to me as a user for finding projects that are more popular (and therefore more "secure" and futureproof). But I think this was also important for the developers of those projects.
I am new to Maven and have not found any comparable statistics, only the "Quick Stats" on Maven Central.
Does the Maven concept (and Nexus) provide detailed statistics: how much a specific artifact has been downloaded as a specific type (like jar, pom etc?). If yes, where can I find this (for example for Hibernate)?
If you publish artifacts with OSS Sonatype (central Maven repo) there are download statistics available for the artifacts you publish from your account.
Note that it usually updates a few days after each month.
Reference: Here's a blog post describing how to access the feature.