Who Cares About Coffee Anyway?
Well, Coffee Review certainly does. Given that you’re reading this post, you probably care. The roughly one million people who visit CoffeeReview.com each year care, at least enough to visit. But what we’re really trying to get at is which cities are most interested in coffee… most passionate about coffee, if you will?
To answer that question, we looked at Coffee Review visitors by city (using Google Analytics; data for year-to-date 2013). Not surprisingly, the top cities in the U.S. were New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. Internationally, the top cities were London, Hong Kong, Toronto, Bangkok, and Sydney.
Obviously, a big driver of traffic is the population of each city. For example, you would expect New York City to have more readers than Seattle just based on the large difference in population, roughly 8.2 million versus 650,000, respectively. So, we normalized for population to calculate visits per capita, which is a better measure of how “passionate” a city is about coffee. Granted, there are many other, perhaps more meaningful, ways to measure how crazy a city is about coffee but here’s what we found based on Coffee Review traffic.
UNITED STATES
1. San Francisco, CA
2. Seattle, WA
3. Washington, DC
4. Minneapolis, MN
5. Atlanta, GA
It’s not surprising to see San Francisco and Seattle at the top of the list. Both cities have great coffee communities with plenty of outstanding roasters and cafes. In fact, there are probably coffee lovers in cafes in these cities reading this post on their laptop or mobile phone right now. Shoot us a tweet (@coffeereview) if you are.
INTERNATIONAL
1. Vancouver, Canada
2. Toronto, Canada
3. Taipei City, Taiwan
4. Melbourne, Australia
5. Sydney, Australia
Vancouver is another great coffee city. There must be something about the Pacific Ocean or Pacific time zone that makes people passionate about coffee. Thanks for visiting, Vancouver. Take note, Toronto, your readership is growing much faster in 2013 than that of Vancouver (64% vs. 37%) so you may well surpass Vancouver soon.
We’ll refine our ranking process and revisit the data later in the year. For example, we can look at roasters and coffee shops per capita. Send us your thoughts on how to improve the rankings. Perhaps, with your help, we can crown a U.S. and world “coffee capital” for 2013?
