Oh I do love some data based World Heirtage articles especially when they intuitively don't quite feel right. Thanks for sharing.
Rio being first, yep plausible Brazil does apparently have the second highest number of Instagram users. But
Budapest and
Porto 2nd and 3rd (above
Paris for example) doesn't intuitively ring true.
Though in saying that Instagram has a much younger user-ship than the general population, and Porto is a very cool place for us* cool kids to go. I guess Budapest and Portugal maybe cheaper places to head to, thus have greater appeal to younger people that are more likley to post.
*I used us as a collective for all the people on this forum, we are All Cool Kids of course :)Also Instagram has a more international make up than the users of this website, so that could account for a bit of the difference, even if we are a well travelled bunch.
But
le Havre being 50th ahead of the
Taj Mahal (56th) is rather surprising. Using my Instagram feed as an unreliable proxy this seems even more suspect, I would say I have approximately 40 odd photos tagged with Taj Mahal, and about 3 with le Havre.
Obviously that reflects the people I follow but, considering the people I follow particularly skew towards World Heritage Sites, 20th Century Architecture, Concrete Architecture and also about 25% are from my home city in England which has a direct ferry link to le Havre it would suggest that it is le Havre that is very over represented in that sample.
My guess would be that they just tallied up a single specific geo tag for each site, meaning somewhere like Paris is really split up (Users would tag things as Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Louvre rather than just Paris, perhaps somewhere with less iconic individual buildings would fare better, e.g. Porto, Lyon, Budapest.
Perhaps also those with non Latin Script or those with different names in other languages are particularly downplayed on there, as they would only look at the English name.
And then there are the obvious errors which I have a feeling
St Kilda being in 28th with 745,219 images is the most glaring one. There are approximately 3,000-4,000 visitors a year to St Kilda (according to their management plan).
Now Instagram has been in existence since 2010, so by a very, very generous estimation that would require every single person that has visited St Kilda in the last 9 years to have share 21 geotagged posts each on Instagram, which would be optimistic to say the least.
I think they probably used the geotag for
St Kilda, the trendy, eminently instagramable, beach-side area of Melbourne.
Still thanks for sharing, always good to get alternative perspectives, even if they are a little flawed :)
