STRAVA Stats 2020
Strava has released its lockdown stats for the USA and UK. There have been many strikingly positive shifts in our activity levels. This is Covid-year and there have been many material changes to our habits.
Global Strava Headlines
- Strava claims to have 73m registered athletes, increasing at 2million/month with 21.5m uploads per week (85m/month).
- Takeout — hmmm. Do the math. 21.5m uploads mean, at most, 21.5m active users in an average week. That’s a lot of inactive accounts despite the impressive customer acquisition rate this year.
The dramatic increase in uploaded activities in April/May is striking. But that chart shows only 16m uploads/week at the start of the year. A ‘real’ active Strava user would upload 2 activities per week, which brings the user base at the start of the year down to below 8m. Adding Strava’s claim of 2m/month new users added this year brings us to around 18m currently active Strava users. The figure of 18m users ties in nicely with 30m uploads ie almost two uploads per person per week.
Country Headline Differences
Our governments asked us to ‘stay indoors’ differently at the start of the year. The draconian lockdowns in Spain and Italy were tightly enforced and people complied and stayed at home. Spain, UK, Germany and USA all seemed to dramatically increase activity levels during the first lockdown when outdoors exercising was permitted.
Sport Differences
Broadly speaking, as nations everywhere, our runs and rides doubled as we left the initial lockdown and I’m guessing our pool swims collapsed as many (all?) pools remained closed. That stat certainly ties in with my personal experience of seeing lots more people working out during the day.
USA vs UK+IRL – Head-to-head
These charts compare the increases in the average number of uploaded activities by age group. The young ladies are putting the rest of us to shame. Another clear trend is that more women have become more active across the entire population.
Looking at WHEN we are all working out, runs and rides became more spread out in the daylight hours of lockdown, especially during the week when you were ‘working’ from home. Perhaps the September data are more interesting in that we have reverted back to following normal patterns.
Getting Faster?
Did all that extra training work? Well, it seems so as there were LOTS more QOMs/KOMs created. Maybe we all got fitter or maybe there were just fewer cars on the road 😉 I did get a KOM but I was in a car at the time, so I swiftly had to delete that accident when I got home!
Strava Proves Its Sociability
There was a clear uptake in new clubs starting up and new club members joining and it’s great that the trend has continued through to Q3. Perhaps in the UK Strava has taken over some of the mantle of parkrun which had been closed for over 6 months — those 1 million Saturday runners might have found Strava Clubs as their new sports community.
Sources: UK_Strava_YIS2020_PressBook and YIS2020_USA
Last Updated on 28 May 2026 by the5krunner
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Interesting stuff; largely confirms what we’ve all been talking about with friends this year (via Skype/Zoom/Teams/WhateverApp), but never had the data to substantiate until now. What will be interesting to see going forward is if 2021 reverts back nearer to 2019, or whether the general change to more people working from home some/all of the time has a lasting impact, even post Covid-19.
I know of a lot people who no longer do their once a week upload due to Parkruns being closed.
Also, sport brands would pay handsomely to show ads to those 18 million.
yes.
i know the founders are against ads.
I still don’t quite understand why strava doesn’t show ads.
The maths is simple to work out the revenue. Conservatively strava would get $2 for every 1000 ad impressions. An easier fudge figure to work with might be $3 per 1000 sessions, although it might be slightly lower on mobile rather than desktop.
As you say, a handsome figure.