How many geocachers are there?

[+treasurehunters5]

My daughter is doing a speech on geocaching and we were looking for a few stats:

Number of cachers in US?

Number of cachers in World?

Percentage of people that cache or have cached?

 

Numbers of caches is easy but cachers was quite different.

 

Thanks!

[+ecanderson]

My daughter is doing a speech on geocaching and we were looking for a few stats:

Number of cachers in US?

Number of cachers in World?

Percentage of people that cache or have cached?

 

Numbers of caches is easy but cachers was quite different.

 

Thanks!

There's no easy answer to this since cachers come and go. There are cachers with quite a few finds that have dropped out altogether, and some that only found one or two caches and aren't active.

 

But to give your daughter at least a LITTLE information about the distribution of cachers around the world, use the 200+ club at www.cacherstats.com. It includes cachers both past and present that have 200 or more finds.

 

What you'll find there is a record of the majority of 66,746 cachers. If nothing else, it will give you a statistical sample of who is where...

 

If the sampling is valid (you'd need to talk to the GHP about how this is managed in foreign countries), you'll find the hobby is wildly popular in Germany (11944 ranked cachers) and not very popular at all in France (274 ranked cachers), and just plain insane in the U.S. (33306 ranked cachers).

[+Chrysalides]

From the front page :

 

"There are 885,042 active caches worldwide. In the last 7 days, there have been 786,565 new logs written by 97,864 account holders."

 

So we know that almost 98,000 account holders were active the last week. Round that up to 100,000, maybe double or triple the # to include those who still geocache but don't do it as regularly?

 

Personally I suspect the figure to be 1000, and everyone else is a sock puppet of Vinny...

[+Snoogans]

According to Mr. Owl, there's 3!

 

[Mr.Yuck]

From the front page :

 

"There are 885,042 active caches worldwide. In the last 7 days, there have been 786,565 new logs written by 97,864 account holders."

 

So we know that almost 98,000 account holders were active the last week. Round that up to 100,000, maybe double or triple the # to include those who still geocache but don't do it as regularly?

 

Personally I suspect the figure to be 1000, and everyone else is a sock puppet of Vinny...

 

Pretty good answer, I'll buy that. But you'll never know for sure. There have been almost 3,000,000 accounts created, but I believe about 1/2 of them have not been, nor ever will be used. Account # 2,628,000 was just created today, with probably a couple thousand or so added daily.