Category: Geocaching in the News

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 days, as of the date of this post, you may have heard of a new app for Android and ios named Pokémon Go. Originally released in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand on July 6th, it became available in Germany on July 13th, and is being rolled out in other European Countries as we speak. You may have seen people doing it. Personally, the OCNA blogger, Mr.Yuck, has observed about 40 people playing in those 10 days, most of them in groups, and most of them in their late teens. That doesn’t mean that he, self described as “well over 40” hasn’t tried it too. As a matter of fact, the screen shot you see here (click to enlarge) is his character standing in his house, looking at a Gym and three Pokéstops in a nearby County Park. Expect a review of the game from the perspective of a long time, old school Geocacher who still plugs a handheld GPS into a computer, in the near future. That won’t happen until he reaches level 5 though, which you must do to participate in all aspects of the game. But for now, we thought it was rather interesting how some early news articles “remember” Geocaching, and compare it to the craze over this new Augmented Reality game. One article even suggests going Geocaching instead of playing Pokémon Go. Four articles are outlined below:

• Local ‘Pokemon Go’ following enthusiastic By the Chillicothe, Ohio, Gazette. The president of the local chamber of commerce compares PG to Geocaching, and notes that (Geocaching) fad has slowed.

• How did Pokemon Go take over the world? By The Chicago Tribune. Discusses how Geocachers like to try to keep the game underground by using stealth, while “Pokemon Go is the running of the bulls in Pamplona.”

• Long Before Pokemon Go, There Was Geocaching By Bloomberg.com. Credits the offline GPS treasure hunt that started in 2000 for paving the way for PG, and is mostly about Geocaching.

• Forget ‘Pokemon Go’ And Try Geocaching, A Worldwide Scavenger Hunt By The Huffington Post. The title should be self explanatory! Surprisingly, the author is not a Geocacher, but his Father is.

That depends on how you define “on the decline”.  If it were defined as the number of new caches created by year, we’re afraid the answer is yes. Here you see a bar graph of caches created by year on our website. Note that caches created doesn’t necessarily mean all of them were published, but 98%+ of them were. Keep in mind our site was launched in mid-August 2010, so there was quite a bit of interest in the new website to have 527 caches created in just 4 1/2 months. Then we had a somewhat unexplained decline in 2011, and we peaked in 2012. You can see where the numbers have gone from there. It’s not just us though. With 3 weeks left in 2014, new caches hidden in The United States in 2014 are down 23% from their 2013 levels on Geocaching.com, as well as being down in most Countries in the world that are considered traditional hotbeds of Geocaching activity. However, there are a few Countries that are exceptions to this overall decline in caches hidden, and there is some good news regarding the number of new Geocachers, and the overall number of caches being found.

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