Photo: Ben Kitching//Unsplash
It doesn’t take a 100-page published research paper to learn that snowboarding’s popularity has outgrown skiing in the United States over the past generation or more. But then again, it can be fun and interesting to geek out on such things when somebody actually does find a way to quantify the popularity gap between them. Enter Snow Season Central, an online collection of writers, marketers, and more providing information for people working in or aspiring to work in the ski and snowboard industry. The group recently published the results of an online study to discover who is the most snowsports obsessed in the United States.
Using data from Google, the company analyzed over 6,000 ski-related terms, measured how frequently each was searched online over the course of 12 months, and ranked the locations of each search per capita. They also managed to quantify just how much more interested Americans are in snowboarding than in skiing these days, which happens to be a pretty wide margin, according to this particular study. The correlation here, of course, is that popularity is determined by how often specific terms are/were searched in the data collecting period. The results:
- Nationally, 61 percent of searches were for snowboarding, compared to 39 percent for skiing.
- Vermont is the most snow-obsessed state in the nation with 356,126 searches per 100,000 people.
- Vermont is also just one of two states in the U.S. where skiing is more popular than snowboarding (by a narrow margin: 52 percent to 48 percent)
- Colorado, which was ranked second, saw 194,885 searches per 100,000 people.
- Nevada (78 percent) and California (76 percent) represent the widest margin of snowboarding’s popularity compared to skiing.
- As a nation, Canada’s split between snowboarding and skiing’s popularity (32 percent skiing, 68 percent snowboarding) is larger than in the United States (39 percent skiing, 61 percent snowboarding). The U.S. also ranks behind Australia when it comes to riding a single plank (66 percent snowboarding).
Snow Season Central
