Hiking Melbourne

Here we go again. Some time ago I wrote a two blog posts about statistics and numbers of geocachers: •  It's going downhill  - Is geocaching declining? •  Quo Vadis Horreum Terrae? - Why is geocaching declining? Since then a year has passed - oh man time flies when you're having fun - and I thought it would be worth revisiting these numbers. Actually I was tracking them for a while now and it's fair to say the game took a nosedive. However lets look at total numbers of 2015 and 2016 first since these years are truly gone by and whoever wanted to log a find would have done that by now. Active Players = 1 find or more that year / Very Active Players = 100 finds or more that year   Remarkably in both years the very active players make up 4.7% of the active players. This roughly 5% seems to be a reoccurring number as shown in previous posts. However there's a clear decline of 7% from 2015 to 2016 which was only 1% from 2014 to 2015. Let's move o...

Here some pics from the weekend. Anja already did a write-up and there's also the logbook of the geocaching event . Enjoy :)

A couple of days after my last geocaching post Groundspeak announced an " introduce a friend " scheme. What a coincident. Basically a virtual badge will be added to your profile, if you're going caching with a muggle friend. I think nobody is under delusion that this will change the general trend but it seems to be more of a test. Groundspeak must be aware of the current downwards trend which begs the question: How did we get here? First let's have a look at other outdoor activities before we jump to any conclusions. Maybe outdoorsy things are going down in general and this is just how things are these days? Nope. That's not it. Everyone else is doing fine and hiking seems to be great. We do like that :) If you translate the search terms into German, the picture remains similar. Looking at the simple word "outdoor" the whole thing gets summed up quite nicely: Do you see Christmas time in there every year? Keep in mind this is only a ...

If you make any claim you have to back it up by cold hard facts. There might be something like a perceived truth which you can find widely across one nation supporters however that rarely coincides with reality. Let's just stick to the cold hard facts. The claim is the following: "Geocaching has reached its peak and is declining." First of all we have to establish a measurement which acts as our key performance indicator (KPI). In order to do so, we have to have a look at the typical or key activity of this hobby: A cache gets found by a player. Yes technically people don't find caches as well however nobody logs DNFs which means we can disregard this. Anyway this results in three things we can measure: Caches Finds Players Since we want to analyse a trend we obviously have to look at the numbers developing over time and check if there is actually a trend. Caches Every week somebody ventures out and places a new cache in a more or less suitable l...

an opinion by Philipp about the development of Geocaching First of all: I'm not saying the good old times were better. I can think of annoying things which disappeared over the years but aren't covered here like crappy user interfaces. Fifteen years ago geocaching was substantially different to the game we play today but that doesn't mean today's game isn't fun anymore. But let's start at the beginning. It is fair to say that I am one of the old-school cachers. Having started in 2003 I have seen a lot of changes like the introduction of LED torches, the launch of Google Maps in 2005 or the release of the iPhone and the substantial introduction of the geocaching app in 2007. 12 years ago finding a cache was completely different process. First you had to figure out how to get there. Where the hell is that box? Seriously: There wasn't a map function on  geocaching.com ! You had to take the coordinates to mapquest and figure out how to drive there yours...

Do people stick to the game of Geocaching? An analysis* with the help of  Geocaching Australia : Have you ever wondered what are the chances that you will see that cacher again you just stumbled upon? While the number of people who heard about or even tried geocaching are constantly increasing, it’s always a mystery if they will be around for longer. So here are some numbers and hard facts: Out of the 110,497 people who have logged caches in Australia since 2000, 3/4 of them (82,000) have only ever found 17 caches or less! If you include our friends across the ditch and set the bar a bit higher it draws a similar picture: From the 110487 people who found at least one cache before 2015 in Australia and New Zealand, only 11353 have found more than 100 which is about 10% of all cachers. It is fair to say that 90% have left before hitting 100 (or are just have yet to hit that mark). 3/4 of all people who’ve cached in Australia stopped logging caches at or before 224 days! 1/2 ...