As geocachingmaine.org approaches 1000 members, geocaching.com is quickly approaching 1,000,000 members.
At 8:30 last night, there were 998,562 members.
At the time of this post, there are 998,789 members.
That's 227 members in about 6.5 hours.
At that rate, we would hit 1,000,000 members about 6 PM tomorrow.

What time do you think it'll happen?

WOW!
That means there are soon to be 1,000,0000 crazy addicts out there searching for tupperware in " them thar hills" not including the regular crazy people...and Hiram of course :D

I'll say GC.com will hit 1M members by 8:00 PM EST

Wow, now wonder they have there own offices now and have turned this into a business. With them approaching 1,000,000 members and if you figure just half of those members are premium members of their web site then they are bringing in $17,500,000 a year. That is a lot of money.

That's nothing! Think of $30 (or more) for gas, $20 (or more) for snacks, $5 (or more). If even 10% of the cachers spend $60 per week, that's over $300 million a year into local economies around the world!

We're at 998960 right now.

Rick, the problem is, there is nowhere near that percentage of paying members. For one thing, many of the accounts are people who signed up and never cached, or found one and didn't like it, created an account then changed their name, as well as sock puppet accounts and the like.

I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but if you consider that of the 200,000 cachers registered in the gc.com forums, 49191 are premium members and 1752 are charter members, so that's about a quarter of them that are paying. And I think it's a logical assumption that a higher percentage of cachers visiting the forums would be paying members than those of the general geocaching population.

Granted, they must be making a decent income in order to pay for all their servers and 12 or more employees.

We're at 998960 right now.

Rick, the problem is, there is nowhere near that percentage of paying members. For one thing, many of the accounts are people who signed up and never cached, or found one and didn't like it, created an account then changed their name, as well as sock puppet accounts and the like.

I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but if you consider that of the 200,000 cachers registered in the gc.com forums, 49191 are premium members and 1752 are charter members, so that's about a quarter of them that are paying. And I think it's a logical assumption that a higher percentage of cachers visiting the forums would be paying members than those of the general geocaching population.

Granted, they must be making a decent income in order to pay for all their servers and 12 or more employees.

I realized that about the accounts that is why I was only figuring half which your right is probably still to high of a number.

OK, if there are 49191 premium members then that is at least $1,721,685 per year coming in from the premium members and this does not include donations, revenues from ads and sales from there store items and probablky other things I am not thinking of. That is still a lot of money and if you add in these other factors I am sure it would double that amount.

Currently at 999007 :)

Here's a snippet from mailing list made by Jeremy Sept of 2000.. little did he know!

Jeremy wrote:

As for banner advertising, I'll never even hope to recoop the costs of working on this project, but if I can at least pay for bandwidth with any kind of revenue I get - it is preferable than asking for money. This is a pet project (and hobby). Hobbies don't make any money. I also won't plague the site with advertising - I'll only use those companies that I find provide a service to the group - and will make it complementary to the site.

There are now 999162 members. I think it may happen tonight, despite my earlier calculations!

I think it will be at 9:35

Just checked and there is 999,290

I figure there will be about 4 or 500 sock puppet accounts made tonight in hopes that someone will be the 1 millionth.

I figure there will be about 4 or 500 sock puppet accounts made tonight in hopes that someone will be the 1 millionth.


... Only to have gc.com snag it out from under their noses for their new mascot... :D

999335

Are we there yet?

999413 Looks like we're slowing down for the evening....

Where you getting these figures anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

Where you getting these figures anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

Using the gc.com forum profile url an entering ID numbers until I come up with a profile missing page

http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?id=999423

Keep upping that ID number until you run out of members

Ok I see that there are indeed sock puppet accounts being used to try for the 1 millionth account as that number indicates.

Ok I see that there are indeed sock puppet accounts being used to try for the 1 millionth account as that number indicates.

Well, you can't be sure of that - a new member is a new member and needs to be validated.

Slow night - glad I didn't stay up for the excitement! ;)

999590

It's almost time!

999923

...and the 1000000th is...
dun_it

Yep, and at 5:57 PM. What's that say about my original calculations in the first post?????

You were way off...
Come on, three minutes, you can do better than that :)

Wow Brdad - you need to get a life!

Wow Brdad - you need to get a life!

I was thinking the same thing, but held back on saying it. LOL.

I suppose I could be placing caches instead. So many light poles, so little time.....

I suppose I could be placing caches instead. So many light poles, so little time.....

Number,numbers, numbers!!!!!!!!:rolleyes: :p :rolleyes:

I suppose I could be placing caches instead. So many light poles, so little time.....

Every time RULOST2? and I pull into a parking space, and see that there's a lightpole right in front of us, we look at each other and start laughing.

:D :D :D

ahhhhhh - and laughter is such an important thing. If nothing else - lightpole caches bring a smile to your face!