Strava’s global reach, confirmed by sampling

In my earlier post I estimated Strava’s active and premium members by randomly sampling 400 of Strava’s 8.2 million user numbers. In this post I look at what that sample reveals about the geographic and demographic profile of those users.

The sample confirmed Strava’s impressive global reach.  Consistent with Strava’s comments, over 70% of their members are outside the United States.

Estimated Strava Members by Country
top 10 countries

The U.K. and Australia are particularly strong markets. About 2.5% of the entire population of these countries has signed up for Strava.  These markets are even stronger when we look only at active users (those who posted an activity in the last 24 days).

Active Users as a Percent of all Members
by country

Here we start to butt up against problems of small sample sizes, but because U.K. members are much more likely to be active than U.S. members, it appears that there are more active Strava members in the U.K. than there are in the U.S.

Active Strava Users By Country
 top 10 countries

I think that Strava’s strength in the U.K. is encouraging for its growth. If it could reach the same percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe that it has in the U.K., it would be very successful.  It’s also interesting to see that Strava is doing reasonably well in Brazil.

Premium
Since I found only nine premium members in my 394 member sample, it’s not very statistically valid to extrapolate from that small sample about premium membership by country, but I found three premium members from the U.K., two each from the U.S. and Australia, one from Italy and one from the Netherlands.  Again, it looks like the U.K. and Australia are great markets for Strava.

Gender
57 members, or 15% of the sample, identified themselves as female. The user names suggested that there may be some obvious under-reporting (I’m looking at you, #3,597,623 “Ingrid”, and #2,712,260 “Lizzy”).

Runners
83 members, or 22% of the sample, identified themselves as runners. This suggests that of Strava’s 8.2 million members, about 1.8 million identify as runners. Of course, self-identified cyclists can post runs and vice-versa; perhaps a future study will sample activity numbers randomly to get a split of runs versus rides.  Self-identified runners were active in about the same percentage as cyclists.  

Women Runners
Women are much more likely to self-identify as runners.  Overall, runners are 22% of members, but 29 of the 57 women sampled (51%) identified themselves as runners.

Achievement Unlocked – Strava Complete!

An Inspirational Tour
Although the process of random sampling and statistics can seem dry and impersonal, I found it inspiring each time I entered a huge number into a Strava URL and I briefly glimpsed the life of an athlete somewhere in the world.  I found myself rooting for them to be active.  For a taste of what this is like, go to your browser window and type “app.strava.com/athletes/_____”, and replace the  _____ with any number between 1 and 8.2 million.

My methodology is repeatable and I encourage others to conduct their own random samples to answer their own questions, confirm or refute my findings. My particular sample, with unique members numbers for validation, can be found here.