Karate is a Japanese martial art which is popular in many countries around the world. It is a popular martial art in the UK too – we have gathered some facts, figures and statistics about karate, such as which parts of the UK search for ‘karate’ the most.
Let’s get right into it!
Karate Statistics - The Quick Version
Here are some of the key headlines we thought you’d like to know:
- London searches the most for ‘karate’.
- There are over 3,000 searches every month looking for karate classes.
- There are around 3 billion views across TikTok for #karate.
How Popular Is Karate In The UK In 2022?
In order to find out which area of the UK was most popular in terms of searches for ‘karate’, we used the Keyword Finder tool and found the following:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘karate’ |
London | 46.57 |
East Midlands | 43 |
UK (Average) | 32.56 |
Scotland | 31.25 |
South East | 30.28 |
North West | 30.20 |
Yorkshire and the Humber | 29.04 |
West Midlands | 28.88 |
Wales | 28.26 |
North East | 25.30 |
South West | 25.17 |
Northern Ireland | 22.69 |
East of England | 19.29 |
In order to work this out, we found out the average monthly search volume in all regions of the UK of the UK and divided this by the estimated population of each area (source ONS). We then multiplied by 100,000 to find these figures.
A few things we can see from this table are:
- London is clearly the most popular region in terms of searches, followed closely by the East Midlands.
- Only 2 UK regions are above the UK average..
- The East of England has the fewest searches for Karate.
We also wanted to see how popular different search terms related to the sport were across the UK. You can see this in the chart below.
From this chart, we can see that:
- There are thousands of searches every month for different terms relating to karate.
- Over 5,000 searches are made for people looking to see the order of the colours of karate belts which shows that the interest is there.
Karate On Social Media
Although karate has thousands of searches across Google, social media is a huge place for fans of the sport with people using YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to show their love for it.
YouTube is a great example to look at. Across the top 10 most viewed videos on the platform when you search ‘karate’, there are around 2.5 billions views. This is an absolutely enormous number which reinforces the idea that karate is a popular sport in modern culture.
When you take Instagram into consideration, there are over 7.5 million posts using the hashtag ‘#karate’. Again, this is a large amount of posts dedicated purely to karate and it shows how much of an impact the sport really does have on users of the app.
TikTok is another platform that should always be taken into consideration when talking about how popular a particular thing is on social media. There are roughly 3 billion views across all the videos using the hashtag ‘#karate’. This figure, much like YouTube, is gigantic. The sheer number of views shows us that karate is still being spoken about and watched and will likely be here for years to come.
Karate Participation Statistics
In 2020, there were around 182,200 people participating in martial arts in the UK. Karate is one of the most popular martial arts so it is likely that it takes up a large amount of the participation.
The chart below shows participation numbers from 2016 to 2020:
This chart shows that there was a large increase in 2018. Could this have been down to Netflix’s Cobra Kai series (a modern-day spin-off of the Karate Kid films), which was launched in the same year? We’d like to think so. The numbers of participants has fallen away in the last 2 years however – so maybe the honeymoon period is over!
There seems to have been a huge increase in popularity for karate on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. We can certainly attribute some of the extra interest to the Cobra Kai series. The fact that there is still a lot of interest in the sport is good news for the future of karate – and of martial arts as a whole.
