All Quiet on the Western Front
The last post is half a year old and honestly not much happened. At least geocaching-wise. Winter is always a busy period. There are mountaineering and dressage events which means looking for tupperware becomes even a lower priority.
However that's my personal experience so let's have a look at the Geocaching statistics instead. As you know, I've been tracking the weekly statistics of Australia and the world for a while now.
In Australia you'll have around 3000 cachers finding at least one cache every week. That number has been fairly constant over the last 2 years and is only bumped up over the school holiday periods which you can see them clearly in the graph.
Globally the weekly geocaching activity shows a bit more seasonality #surprise ... well not really given the big geocaching countries (Germany, Czech Republic, UK and that failed state in America) have something called winter which involves snow and stuff like that.
Obviously this year's line doesn't go all the way till the end but don't expect a major difference compared to the previous years. Geocaching doesn't seem to be high on the agenda in the busy Christmas period.
There are also a couple of other things you need to keep in mind when looking at the graphs. You have a core of very active cachers (100 and more finds per year) which are over-represented in the weekly stats throughout the year although they only make up roughly 5% of the geocaching population. In reality the vast majority goes caching for a short period and then that's it for the year. E.g. on average there are 3200 active cachers in Australia on a weekly basis however over the year they only add up to roughly 40,000 players. Globally the ratio is fairly similar - 150k weekly and 1.5 million cachers throughout the year.
There are also a couple of other things you need to keep in mind when looking at the graphs. You have a core of very active cachers (100 and more finds per year) which are over-represented in the weekly stats throughout the year although they only make up roughly 5% of the geocaching population. In reality the vast majority goes caching for a short period and then that's it for the year. E.g. on average there are 3200 active cachers in Australia on a weekly basis however over the year they only add up to roughly 40,000 players. Globally the ratio is fairly similar - 150k weekly and 1.5 million cachers throughout the year.
What are you showing me? This is so flat!
Absolutely! It is! As you can see that last year (blue) is well below 2016 (green) and this trend has flat-lined this year (red) - both in Australia and globally. I think Geocaching as a game has reached saturation. I don't expect major changes in 2019 unless someone comes up with a game-changer.
Ok. dad-joke. I'll see myself out.
Cheers
Philipp
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