The Couch Surfing tidal wave.
June 7th, 2009
In August last year I posted a blog about couchsurfing.com reaching an amazing 700,000 members, but while I was away on my last trip the website hit the MILLION mark! And since then they have snuck up to 1,167,005 members with close to 15,000 joining EVERY week. Now, I’m not very good at maths, but at this growth rate I figure that the entire world will have their couch registered by 2025. There are now 232 countries represented and 59,599 cities. I found this info on the stats page on the couchsurfing website. I love stats. I hope you do too because I’m just about to share a whole bunch of them with you…
There is one stat that I’m quite proud of. Of the 59,599 cities listed my little ol’ hometown of Melbourne comes in at number 8 for most members (above much larger cities like LA, Moscow, Amsterdam, Chicago and Rio). The top eleven are (I’ve done eleven to get Sydney into the list so I can brag about having TWO Australian cities at the top of the list!):
Paris (20,897 members)
London (18,059)
Berlin (14,891)
Montreal (13,795)
Istanbul (9,723)
Vienna (9,715)
New York (8,370)
Melbourne (7,942)
San Francisco (7,436)
Barcelona (7,327)
Sydney (7,087)
Here’s some more riveting stats: The ‘average age’ of a couchsurfer is 27, but there also almost 9,000 over the age of 60 including 255 over the age of 80. Of the 1,268 languages the most widely spoken is English with 965,111 speakers and the least spoken languages include 13 Wayuu speakers, 9 Mapudungan speakers and all of 4 Lojban speakers. (I had to check Wikipedia – Wayuu is a local dialect from North eastern Venezuela, Mapudungan is from Argentina and Lojban is a ’syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic’ – uh?). There is one worrying statistic, though: 591,863 members are male, 481,863 are female and 14,198 list their ‘gender’ as ‘unknown’.
On July 24th, 2009 Jack said: