England and Wales property sales March 2016

I’ve uploaded the latest property sales data from the Land Registry to my website. Prices continue on their upward trajectory.

doogal.co.uk now using https

For a while now, Google has been trying to get everyone to move their sites over to https. There’s lots of valid reasons to do this, although the majority of sites don’t really need it.

The carrot of improved rankings hadn’t prompted me to make the change but Chrome 50 removed support for geolocation services which I use in a number of places. So the site was broken in Chrome 50. And it was that stick that motivated me to make the switch.

One reason I’d held off from using https was the cost of a certificate. But things have moved on and it’s now possible to grab a certificate for nothing from Let’s Encrypt. It’s pretty simple to acquire and install a certificate using these instructions. 

So the switch has been made. For most users of the site, nothing should have changed, unless I’ve broken something (let me know!). Comments are currently being migrated, so you may find some comments aren’t where they should be. If you are grabbing data from the site directly you may need to change the URL you use from http:// to https://. 

Sampling Strava again

I thought I’d repeat the experiment conducted by Mark Slavonia last year to see how the Strava usage numbers stack up now.
First I needed to know the number of signed up users of Strava. This is pretty straightforward, head off to https://www.strava.com/athletes/6161562 and keep increasing the number at the end until Strava says it can’t find a user. Last March there were 8.2 million users, now there are about 14.4 million, not a bad increase for just over a year.
Next I wanted to capture the active users and the premium users. Since I’m a techy, I can automate this process using the Strava API and a .NET wrapper around it. So I decided to sample 1 in every 10,000 users, giving me about 1,440 sample users which should give the results a reasonable accuracy.
After pulling down that data, the first thing I noticed was that 47 of my requests had returned ‘Not Found’ errors. In fact, most of these were grouped together, suggesting Strava decided to restart their numbering with larger IDs at some point. So the total number of users is probably just shy of 14 million.

Premium Users

Of the 1.393 users I had left, 28 were Premium users, so approximately 2% of all users. This figure is pretty close to last year’s figure so I’m happy to believe it. That equates to 280,000 premium users or $16.6 million in revenue for Strava.
As an aside, I’m a Premium member, but not because Strava offers particularly compelling features for Premium users, but mainly to show my support for a website that is exceedingly useful and fun. I suspect Strava could differentiate between free and Premium a lot more to increase the percentage of Premium users. Take a look at all the functionality available at veloviewer.com.

Active Users

The Strava API doesn’t let me get activity data for other users, so I’m not able to find out how active users are directly. But it does provide an Updated field, which I’m hoping gets updated when a user uploads an activity (the Strava API docs are a little vague on this point). Using last year’s definition of an active user being someone who has done something in the last 24 days, how many active users are there? I found 181 users where that Updated field was in the last 24 days. That’s about 13%, or 1.8 million active users. The percentage is again fairly close to last year’s figure so I’m happy to go with it.

Gender

I found 806 men and 270 women and 317 blanks. Ignoring the blanks, that almost exactly a 75% / 25% split between men and women.

By Country

I think my sample is too small to draw accurate conclusions from the home countries of Strava users, but lets play with the numbers anyway. 463 had blank entries for the country which leaves 930 users with a country specified. I’ve removed countries with less than 5 users in my sample and then adjusted for population. Below I’ve highlighted the countries where more than 2% of the population have signed up for Strava. It seems like there is massive potential to increase usage in many countries, although that may depend on whether there is a culture of recreational running and riding in these countries (China and India being the obvious biggest potential markets). And little old blighty, the UK, is top of the pile. Go UK!

Country	Population	Sampled users	Approximate Strava users	% of population
Australia	24,309,330	35	527,000	2.2
Austria	8,569,633	5	75,000	0.9
Belgium	11,371,928	6	90,000	0.8
Brazil	209,567,920	74	1,114,000	0.5
Canada	36,286,378	25	376,000	1.0
Chile	18,131,850	6	90,000	0.5
Colombia	48,654,392	9	135,000	0.3
Denmark	5,690,750	5	75,000	1.3
France	64,668,129	35	527,000	0.8
Germany	80,682,351	18	271,000	0.3
India	1,326,801,576	5	75,000	0.0
Ireland	4,713,993	9	135,000	2.9
Italy	59,801,004	37	557,000	0.9
Japan	126,323,715	9	135,000	0.1
Mexico	128,632,004	6	90,000	0.0
Netherlands	16,979,729	32	482,000	2.8
New Zealand	4,565,185	9	135,000	3.0
Philippines	102,250,133	8	120,000	0.1
Poland	38,593,161	5	75,000	0.2
Portugal	10,304,434	16	241,000	2.3
Romania	19,372,734	6	90,000	0.5
Russia	143,439,832	12	181,000	0.1
South Africa	54,978,907	16	241,000	0.4
South Korea	50,503,933	14	211,000	0.4
Spain	46,064,604	46	692,000	1.5
Switzerland	8,379,477	7	105,000	1.3
Taiwan	23,395,600	14	211,000	0.9
Ukraine	44,624,373	6	90,000	0.2
UK	65,111,143	153	2,303,000	3.5
US	324,118,787	233	3,508,000	1.1

Strava segments by year

I thought I’d do a little analysis of the data I’m slowly collecting on my Strava segment explorer. Every segment has a numeric ID and these started at 1* and each new segment gets an ID of one greater than the most recent segment. So it’s quite easy to figure out how many segments are getting created over time.
So since I don’t have a huge dataset to analyse, lets see how many segments had been created at the end of every year.

So what’s this tell us? It shows the total number of segments created at the end of every year and it looks like since 2011, the number of segments created every year has remained fairly constant. I guess the interesting question would be whether creation of segments can be used as some kind of proxy for usage of Strava since Strava keep this information confidential? I think the answer to that is probably no. A new user in an area already choc full of segments probably isn’t going to feel the need to create more, although they may create a few personal ones (home to work etc). Long term users probably already have all the segments they need. A better approach would be to repeat this study from last year.
But I guess it does show Strava is still being actively used by its users, beyond that it’s hard to say anything definitive.
*Not entirely true, the lowest ID I’ve found is 96, but I imagine the ID of the first segment ever created was 1.