Ah, a new year. Time for resolutions and the best of intentions, or what’s left of them at this point. You might have resolved to eat less, work out more, sleep like you’re supposed to and not like a burnt out workaholic, or learn a shiny new skill. But you might want to resolve to get outside more. Seriously, it’s science. Perhaps bathe in the forest (not like that, get your mind out of the gutter). Where is this intro going? Honestly not sure, I don’t know how to segue out of this to my main point.
[insert seamless segue here]
While listening to the Coin Talk podcast recently (Did you resolve to listen to more podcasts? We have some recommendations for you!), a comment made about social media/internet companies stuck out to me.
It’s a great, great product and products like Coinbase are measured in their daily active users, their monthly active users, the amount of stuff people are doing on them and I don’t think Coinbase ever could have been happy with just Bitcoin. It wants people doing stuff every day.
This is how people in northern California think about the problem with technology and how to make a lot of money with it…
Basically, they want you to be addicted to their product and use it on the regular.
Naturally, my first thought was “if the National Park System was a social network, how would it stack up?” I’m sure you had the exact same first thought. ?
The answer? It’s more a niche network on the fringes than the Next Big Thing™. If we compare monthly active users on a global level the NPS is well outside the top 20 social networks. But, if we compare it to just monthly active users of social networking mobile apps in the US, the NPS ranks 8th, between Reddit and Tumblr. And ahead of a bunch of apps you probably don’t have installed, and maybe haven’t heard of.
Find more statistics at Statista
According to the National Park Service’s monthly reporting, the park system averaged 26.6 million recreation visits per month. Across 377 parks. The most popular park was Golden Gate National Recreation Area at 1.3 million monthly visits on average. Just for context, the Facebook mobile app had 169 million monthly active users as of July 2018. Globally the network has 2.23 billion MAUs.
I’d like to recommend a resolution this year: find a National Park and go visit. Let’s make them a more popular social network.
2019: The Year of Getting Way Out There.
The National Park map image is designed and printed by The Landmark Project, check out the collection.