Postcrossing Blog

Some time ago, Pebbles84 sent us this suggestion for a blog post:

“How about an overview of how country distribution has changed over the years? I’m a member for over 2 years, and it seems things have changed quite a lot. It would be nice to see in which countries Postcrossing has grown a lot, and how the amount of members has changed.”

If you’ve been a member for a long time, you probably have noticed that Postcrossing’s popularity in certain countries changes over time. Sometimes, a news report or a blurb on a popular website will catapult the project to stardom, raising the number of signups in that city or country.

Members that have been here since the beginning might remember a time when every other card seemed to be traveling to Portugal, Brazil or Finland, or how rare Asian countries once were. These days, there are definitely more users from Russia or Taiwan on the site – countries come and go in waves.

Being data geeks, we were curious to see what the member distribution looked like plotted in a graph, and so we crunched some numbers and did the math.

You can explore the results on the interactive chart below:

Isn’t it interesting? You can see when Postcrossing started to become popular in some countries, or how others have lost their prominent rank. Also, the “Other” category is growing, meaning that the pool of countries is becoming increasingly diverse.

Keep in mind however, that the countries that have the most users are not always the ones that send more postcards! If you’re curious, you can check out the current number of members per country and postcards sent per country on our Explore Countries page!

You can probably guess which countries have more members in Postcrossing just by looking at where you send or receive to/from, right? And we even have some statistics to show that too.

But, obviously not all countries have the same population! If we would take a sample of the same dimension in each country, which ones would contain more Postcrossers in it? Or in other words, in which ones is Postcrossing more popular?

We decided to do the math and share the results with you. We took into account the approximate population of each country, the number of users and came up with an interesting list.

And here’s how the ranking of the top 50 look like:

#	Country	Postcrossers (per 100,000 habitants)
1	Finland	220
2	Estonia	138
3	Lithuania	124
4	Netherlands	75
5	Macau	63
6	Taiwan	61
7	Latvia	51
8	Belarus	47
9	Iceland	43
10	Portugal	40
11	Singapore	35
12	Guernsey and Alderney	28
13	Slovenia	26
14	New Zealand	26
15	Czech Republic	25
16	Poland	24
17	Germany	18
18	Australia	17
19	Hong Kong	17
20	Luxembourg	15
21	Man (Isle of)	15
22	Malta	15
23	Norway	14
24	Canada	13
25	Switzerland	13
26	Belgium	13
27	Jersey	13
28	Austria	12
29	Russia	11
30	Croatia	10
31	U.S.A.	10
32	United Kingdom	10
33	Ireland	9
34	Hungary	8
35	Ukraine	8
36	Sweden	7
37	Brunei	7
38	Slovakia	6
39	Thailand	6
40	Malaysia	6
41	Puerto Rico	5
42	France	5
43	Montenegro	4
44	Spain	4
45	Denmark	4
46	Qatar	4
47	Turkey	3
48	Bulgaria	3
49	Moldova	3
50	Romania	3

Surprise, surprise – Finland is at the very top. I bet you all guessed that one. But did you guessed all the following ones? Indeed, we had some surprises as well. Tiny Estonia with 1,3 million people manages to have plenty of Postcrossers. Same goes for Lithuania and even more with Macau!

Are there other statistics you would be curious to see here? Let us know!

PS: To calculate the data above we took into account only countries with more than 10 users and excluded countries which were too small or of which we did not have any relevant population data.

Over the past weeks we have received a lot of feedback from the Postcrossing members for what kind of statistics they would like to see. While we can’t possible implement everything that was requested (or the system would be too complex to both use and make) we collected what were the most requested items and started working on it.

Today I’m happy to announce that we have the new user statistics ready for you to give it a try! Each account has its own personal statistics that reflect its account data.

You can access your own stats using the left menu on 'My stats’. Please keep in mind this is work in progress so if you find any problems, be sure to tell us so we can fix it as soon as possible.

As usual, please let us know what you think!

We have been quite busy lately with tweaks and improvements to Postcrossing! Here are some of the things we are excited about:

Twitter integration

If you have a twitter.com account, this feature is for you! Postcrossing can now automatically publish your events (for instance, when you send or register a postcard) to your twitter stream. And it’s really easy to setup!

More stats

Do you like statistics? We have been improving these, adding more graphics and information to the stats page. Let us know what else you would like to see in there.

Improved invite friends

Have many friends that might like Postcrossing? Too hard to remember all of their cryptic email addresses? No problem! Now it’s much simpler to invite friends in Postcrossing because you can import your contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and MSN accounts easily. We have used the latest technology available to make it really safe, so you don’t have to give us your email account username and password. Give it a try to see what we mean.

And many more to come! We know you have suggestions for changes and improvements for the project and we’d love to hear them – while we can’t promise to do all of them, we will certainly look into it so give us a shout!