The Growth of Geocaching

[Guest Moun10Bike]

I've put together a chart that might be of interest to the group. It is a chart of the growth of geocaching, graphing the total number of caches hidden by date. You can view it at http://moun10bike.homestead.com/files/growth.jpg.

 

If you look at the chart, you can see some interesting features. First of all, I see at least 3 major upticks in the growth rate (i.e. points where the slope of the line increases noticeably). The first appears to be at the end of September 2000. I can't recall exactly, but is this about when Jeremy's web site went online? The second coincides approximately with Christmas, 2000. I assume that this is when a lot of active geocachers received new GPSs and/or had some time around the holidays to first get involved in the activity. Lastly, the third major increase appears to occur at the start of February 2001. Looking at http://www.geocaching.com/press.asp, it appears that this might coincide with a number of press stories about geocaching. You will also notice a stair-stepping effect in the line that illustrates that most caches are hidden on weekends.

 

A couple of other interesting facts that I uncovered while putting this chart together:

 

* Last day with NO caches placed: January 24, 2001

* Date with the most caches placed: February 18, 2001 (Sunday of President's Day Weekend), with 59

 

Not a bad first year for geocaching, huh? I wonder how much increase we'll see in the future!

 

[This message has been edited by Moun10Bike (edited 17 May 2001).]

[Guest Silver]

Wow! The graph sure looks like a classic exponential growth curve to me!

 

Way to go, geocachers! Welcome to the start of a fast-growing sport!

 

Silver

[Guest bunkerdave]

Nice Work. I appreciate people who take the time to report things like this. I am doing a little one of my own - Caches per capita for each state. I actually am only doing this because I am so sure it will be Utah, where I live and GeoCache. I will try and get those data on here this week. Maybe someone has already done it?

[Guest Scout]

How are you guys getting your data? The search mechanisms on the site are primitive. I'd hate to think you are manually calling up searches on each state and saving the results for off-line analysis. Do you have some other access to the underlying database than what seems to be available via the Web pages?

[Guest Peter Scholtz]

quote:

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Originally posted by Moun10Bike:

Not a bad first year for geocaching, huh? I wonder how much increase we'll see in the future!

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At the current rate of expansion we should have 6,522 caches by 20 February 2002 calculated with the following formula:

 

(365.25 / (dateserial(2001,5,16) - dateserial(2001,2,21))) * (2300 - 800)

 

Assuming the rate stays the same, though it should increase. We might very well have 10,000 caches a year from now!

 

------------------

Peter Scholtz

www.biometrics.co.za

[Guest Moun10Bike]

quote:

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Originally posted by Scout:

How are you guys getting your data?

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Back before Jeremy created his site, I started keeping an Excel spreadsheet of caches as they were posted to Mike Teague's old geocaching site. I've just kept updating it, and then decided to start graphing the curve of growth a couple of weeks ago. I do it the "old-fashioned" manual way of just adding the caches one-by-one as they appear on the site -- definitely nothing sophisticated! I'd love if I had the knowledge to write a data mining program that could do it all for me auto-magically.

 

One thing to note about the graph -- it includes plundered/lost and unapproved caches in the count, so the total caches shown will always be greater than the number of active caches reported by geocaching.com.

[Guest jeremy]

he integers starting with 1 and grabbing the dates out of every page. Of course that bangs at the site like crazy. I believe this is how Ed Hall creates his maps.

 

I want to stress that you can't just suck the data from the site and post it elsewhere. That's copyright infringement. But I don't mind if folks want to generate reports, or with permission (like Ed Hall) create things like maps.

 

Jeremy

[Guest bunkerdave]

I actually did go through all 50 states on the cache seeking search to get the number of caches per state. Now I am just looking for current census information to get the population per state. Poor California - even with over 300 caches, they will probably still come in last. Oh well...you know what they say about statistics.

[Guest Moun10Bike]

quote:

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Originally posted by bunkerdave:

I am doing a little one of my own - Caches per capita for each state. I actually am only doing this because I am so sure it will be Utah, where I live and GeoCache. I will try and get those data on here this week. Maybe someone has already done it?

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I just did it -- it was pretty easy to generate the report from the Excel sheet I already have. Take a look at http://moun10bike.homestead.com/files/PerCapita.jpg . And you are absolutely correct! Utah is leading the pack by a wide margin!

[Guest cache_ninja]

i bet there has actually been more growth than this in terms of participants, i would guess there are more people seeking than hiding caches..but you are working with what you got. maybe an interesting comparison for people who care about this stuff would be the number of people creating accounts since the site opened/per month etc. or not.

[Guest Jim the Unregistered]

Here's a link for the 2000 census info you need:

 

http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/tab02.txt

[Guest Moun10Bike]

quote:

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Originally posted by Jim the Unregistered:

Here's a link for the 2000 census info you need:

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thanks for posting that link, Jim. I've updated my chart using this new data (I was previously using estimated 1999 populations).

[Guest bunkerdave]

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[This message has been edited by bunkerdave (edited 29 May 2001).]

[Guest DavidS]

quote:

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Originally posted by Moun10Bike:

I see at least 3 major upticks in the growth rate (i.e. points where the slope of the line increases noticeably).

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This is my first posting here, so please forgive me if something goes wrong (like the quote above).

 

I find your diagram very interesting and would like to know more about the growth rate of the sport. It?s definitely growing but by how much? Is there any differences between seasons, months etc? You hint that there are differences, but it?s hard to see exactly from the diagram. Is it possible for you do make a diagram which plots the growth rate of the number of caches per month or per week?

 

David