What's the Matter with Kansas (and the Rest of the US)?
How recent search trends in the US differ from worldwide trends and what that means for growth in the US versus worldwide
As shown in What Are the Most Recent Search Trends Telling Us?, even in recent months, the number of Google searches that included terms for disc golf was lower than it was for the corresponding months in the prior year, which suggests that the decline in the rate of growth of the number of disc golf participants worldwide has not yet bottomed out. In this post, I will explore how recent search trends in the US differ from worldwide trends and what that means for the growth in the number of disc golf participants in the US versus the world.
Set forth below is the graph from Trends in Worldwide Searches for Disc Golf that shows the trends from 2010 to 2024 in the volume of Google searches for terms that include terms for disc golf in the US and worldwide.
Compared to the US, the worldwide volume of Google searches that included terms for disc golf had a sharper peak in 2021, a sharper drop off in 2022 and 2023, and a more moderating (versus accelerating) drop off in 2024.
As shown in The Relationship between Search Volume and Disc Golf Growth:
a flat trendline for the volume of searches indicates a steady (not increasing or decreasing) rate of growth in participation (i.e. a steady rate of increase (or a steady rate of decrease) in the number of participants)
an increase in the volume of searches indicates an increase in the rate of growth of participation (i.e. an increasing rate of increase (or decreasing rate of decrease) in the number of participants)
a decrease in the volume of searches indicates a decrease in the rate of growth of participation (i.e. a decreasing rate of increase (or increasing rate of decrease) in the number of participants); whether a decrease in the volume of searches indicates an actual decline in the number of participants depends on how long and steep the decrease in search volume is
Therefore, the moderating drop off for worldwide volume in 2024 compared to the accelerating drop off for US volume suggests that a return to a stable or increased rate of growth in disc golf participation is closer on a worldwide basis than in the US.
To get a closer look at what has happened in the past 12 months worldwide versus in the US, set forth below is graph comparing the differences from the corresponding months in the prior year in the volume of Google searches that included terms for disc golf worldwide and in the US.
As shown in the graph, in each of the past 12 months, the decline in search volume from the corresponding month in the prior year was greater in the US than it was worldwide. This confirms that the near-term outlook for disc golf growth appears rosier from a worldwide perspective than for the US alone.
Since the US probably has about 2/3 of all disc golf participants worldwide,1 the substantially greater recent decline in search volume in the US than worldwide suggests that search volume in non-US countries that included terms for disc golf was not only declining less but possibly actually increasing, in turn suggesting that trends in recent disc golf participation growth are much more positive in most of those countries than in the US. Unfortunately, Google Trends does not allow you to get search volume numbers for non-US countries as a whole or for Europe as a whole and does not allow you to get search volumes for multiple countries on the same scale. So, in the next post, I will take a look at what has been happening in the biggest non-US markets for disc golf - Finland, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Estonia and Germany - individually.
I am making that assertion based on evidence showing that the US has about 2/3 of all disc golf courses worldwide. See Trends in Worldwide Searches for Disc Golf.