Disc Golf Is Sooo Much More Popular in Some Other Countries than in the US
Google Trends shows that there are four countries where disc golf is 2x to 6x as popular as in the United States
One of the fun features of Google Trends is that you can use it to show the relative interest in a topic in different countries. Google Trends assigns values to each country on a scale from 0 to 100, where the value of 100 is assigned to the country with the highest percentage of searches that relate to that topic. A value of 40 for a country would mean that the percentage of searches related to the topic in that country was only 40% as high. For example, if, in a given year, the country where the highest percentage of searches relating to disc golf was Finland, where 0.1% of all searches related to disc golf, and, in that year, 0.04% of searches in the United States related to disc golf, the value for Finland would be 100 and the value for the United States would be 40.
Set forth below is a chart showing the relative interest in disc golf (based on the relative percentages of searches that related to disc golf), in each year from 2011 through 2024, in Finland, the United States, Sweden, Canada, Norway, Denmark, New Zealand and Estonia.1 Those 8 states were selected because they were all in the top 10 in relative interest in disc golf in 2024 and were all assigned values in every year from 2011 through 2024.2
The chart shows that interest in disc golf was higher in Finland than any other country until 2023, when interest in Estonia started exceeding that in Finland. Since the 2021, interest in disc golf in Norway and Sweden has been rising toward the levels in Finland and Estonia. The declines in the values for the United States in 2012-2015 and in Estonia in 2020-2021 don’t mean that there was a decline in interest in disc golf in the United States and Estonia during those years; it just means that interest in disc golf in those countries declined relative to the interest in Finland because interest in disc golf in Finland was soaring. Interest in disc golf is currently substantially higher in Estonia, Finland, Norway and Sweden than in the United States. Since in 2024, the values for those countries were 100, 85, 62 and 38, respectively, while the value for the United States was 16, interest in disc golf in those countries was anywhere from 2x to 6x that in the United States.
I used searches for the topic of disc golf rather than searches for any specific terms for disc golf, because the topic theoretically includes all searches relating to disc golf, regardless of the term or language, and the comparative interest feature does not allow you to combine multiple specific terms.
Iceland and Latvia also appear in the top 10 for 2024, but were not assigned a value for one or more years during 2011-2023, no doubt due to insufficient Google search volume.