__As a break from compiling leaderboards, here is my local story…__Like hundreds of millions of others, I really enjoy being a Local Guide and making my small contribution to our world, a global village. However, without any doubt, the thing that I enjoy most about being a Local Guide, is searching out those missing places on Maps and doing my best to get them on the Map. This could simply be a small café or restaurant that has existed for a while, or a new business that has just started off. In these tough economic times, these businesses need a helping hand and not only that, helping others in the local community know about such places is a real win-win.
So being a bit of numbers nerd (like many others here), for sometime now I’ve been monitoring the impact that I have been making on such “missing businesses”, and like hundreds of other Local Guides that use the Top 100 Local Guides System, I’ve also been using this system but in this instance, from a slightly different angle, to monitor the impact of my additions of missing places on Maps and this is what this post is about. More specifically, I want to share with you a brief snapshot of the impact that this side of my Local Guide contributions has been having.
I started recording this dataset back on September 30, 2020 when the views on the places I added was 34,000,000. However, for brevity’s sake, here in the table below, I will only show some 10 data records which is enough to demonstrate the data trend and impact of my adding missing places on Maps.
Date | No of missing places added |
Views on the places added |
---|---|---|
Nov 9, 2021 | 566 | 66,000,000 |
Nov 23, 2021 | 566 | 67,000,000 |
Mar 8, 2022 | 584 | 79,000,000 |
Mar 29, 2022 | 585 | 81,500,000 |
Jun 14,2022 | 591 | 91,500,000 |
Jul 5, 2022 | 592 | 94,000,000 |
Aug 2, 2022 | 594 | 98,500,000 |
Aug 16, 2022 | 594 | 100,000,000 |
May 16, 2023 | 603 | 150,000,000 |
? | 604 | 200,000,000 |
Firstly, with so many Local Guides out there, I’m sure that you like me are finding that adding new places onto the Map is getting much harder. I’ve certainly found this to be the case in recent times and the first chart below showing a flattening off trendline, clearly demonstrates this. For example, by early-August 2022 I had added 594 missing places on Maps and as I write today, I have added 604 missing places, so that’s only 10 new places in the past 9 months! Of course there have been a number of major factors like COVID that have not only impacted on businesses but also my ability to travel as widely as I have been able to in the past but nonetheless the trendline of finding and adding missing places has been flattening!
However, notwithstanding this, I still find it amazing, in fact fascinating, that the places I have added on Maps continue to attract so many views. As you can see from the summary table above, by 16 August 2022 the 594 missing places I added on Maps attracted 100 million views (see also 100,000,000 views on the places you’ve added) which is an average of 168,350 views per place added! Again there is an apparent flattening of the numbers in the main COVID period but things look like they might be shooting up once again. Let’s hope so!
Now on 16 May, 2023, that’s some 9 months later, this figure has grown to 150 million which is an average of 248,756 views per place added. That’s an increase of some 80,400 views per place added on Maps over the 9 months or an average of 8,934 views per place per month. Now keep in mind here that I’m talking about views for the missing places I’ve added on maps and not the total contribution views which today is 595 million! Therefore, 25% of the views are coming from the missing places I’ve added on Maps!!!
I’ve said this many times before, we don’t get points for views, however, knowing that on average each of the missing places I’ve added on Maps have had some 248,756 views and that every single view has potentially helped someone make a decision, such as whether a place is worth visiting or a meal is worth having, while nothing to do with points, I find this side of being a Local Guide very, very satisfying.
- Do you love adding missing places on Maps? If so, we’d love to hear from you.
- Would you like to hear how I go about finding missing places on Maps? If so, wait for my next post on this topic.
- Are you perhaps also a data nerd that can show an interesting view of your missing places added data? If so we’d all love to hear from you.