Although many people may not think skateboarding is a sport, it was actually approved to be a sport in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. This article is all about different skateboarding statistics, largely led by trends in search engine searches for the activity and its associated equipment and facilities.
Skateboarding Statistics - The Quick Version
Here are some of the key headlines from our research, but please continue reading for even more information!
- 1 in 8 adults in the UK say they skateboard
- The term ‘skateboard’ is searched the most in Stockport.
- There are 11 billion views on TikTok for #skateboarding.
- Over 50,000 people participate in skateboarding in the UK.
How Popular Is Skateboarding In The UK?
We were extremely intrigued to find out which areas of the UK were most popular in terms of different search terms on Google. To find this out, we used the Keyword Finder tool and we found the following:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘skateboard’ |
Stockport | 717.81 |
Oldham | 683.55 |
Peterborough | 618.40 |
Warrington | 568.13 |
Rochdale | 565.20 |
Bournemouth | 527.99 |
Bristol | 522.48 |
Exeter | 519.79 |
Swindon | 509.75 |
Huddersfield | 490.95 |
UK (Average) | 382.60 |
In order to work this out, we found out the average monthly search volume in the most populous areas of the UK (according to the 2011 Census) and divided this by the number of the population of each area. We then multiplied by 100,000 to find these figures.
Some of the key things we can see from this table are:
- Stockport is in the lead by a large amount in terms of searches per 100,000 head of the population, followed by Oldham and Peterborough in 2nd and 3rd place.
- 4 of the top 10 are in the North West and 4 are in the South West.
We also decided to research which place was searching for the term ‘skateboard wheels’. We used the same method as above and here are the findings:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘skateboard wheels’ |
Norwich | 26.78 |
Southend-on-Sea | 22.79 |
Bristol | 22.39 |
Bournemouth | 21.33 |
Warrington | 18.13 |
Exeter | 17.62 |
Brighton | 17.41 |
Plymouth | 17.02 |
Swindon | 16.44 |
Ipswich | 13.80 |
UK (Average) | 12.30 |
We can see a couple of things from this, such as:
- Norwich searches the most for ‘skateboard wheels’, followed by Southend-on-Sea and Bristol.
- 6 of the top 10 places are in Southern regions.
We then wanted to do this a third time to consolidate our research, but we decided to do this for the term ‘penny board’. A penny board is basically just a smaller version of a skateboard. It allows the user to easily carry the board if they have to as it’s small and compact. We used the same method as the previous tables and found this:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘penny board’ |
Belfast | 203.42 |
Peterborough | 197.89 |
Stockport | 179.45 |
Warrington | 175.27 |
Glasgow | 169.35 |
Bristol | 156.74 |
Newcastle upon Tyne | 156.68 |
Sunderland | 149.18 |
Swindon | 147.99 |
Ipswich | 144.87 |
UK (Average) | 108.93 |
We can see a few things from this table:
- Belfast is the most popular place for searching penny boards, followed by Peterborough and Stockport.
- 4 of the top 10 places are in Northern regions.
- Belfast is almost twice as high as the UK average.
Skateboarding On Social Media
The sport isn’t only popular in terms of search volume, it’s also popular across many of the main social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
On Instagram alone, there have been over 14 million posts using the hashtag ‘#skateboarding’. This number is proof that many people are interested in the sport across Instagram and reinforces the idea that the sport is popular in general on social media.
TikTok is another place where skateboarding is popular. There has been an enormous 11 billion views across the skateboarding hashtag on the app. This figure is mind-blowing and further shows the sheer amount of people who are interested in the sport on TikTok. The most popular video on this hashtag has around 7.5 million views.
Another great example to use is YouTube. Out of the thousands of videos uploaded that appear when searching ‘skateboarding’, the top 5 most viewed videos add up to over 300 million views. This number is astronomical and again shows us how popular skateboarding really is across modern culture.
Skateboarding Participation Statistics
In 2020, there were roughly 53,000 people participating in skateboarding across the UK. This has been slowly increasing since 2016, however, there was a large increase in 2018 alone as you can see in the chart below.
This shows that the sport may actually be on an increase of people participating which is a positive from this. We can also see that 2018 had a huge increase in terms of participation.
Skateboarding seems to have recently had an increase in popularity on both social media and people participating in the sport. It’s such a great thing that it’s been approved to be a sport at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics because it means there will be more eyes on it, which could further push the number higher.
