Time Magazine declares Makati City, Philippines “Selfie Capital of the World”
posted Wednesday, March 12, 2014 at 2:05 PM EDT
Ever wondered who in the world are the most dedicated selfie-takers? Well, wonder no more. The folks at Time Magazine have crunched the numbers, and found the Top 100 selfie obsessed cities on the planet. Leading the pack is Makati City, Philippines, with a rate of 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people. America showed strongly to, taking positions 2, 3, and 4, with Manhattan (202 per 100,000), Miami (155 per 100,000), and Anaheim/Santa Ana (147 per 100,000) respectively.
Here are the top 20 cities (you can click through to the link above if you want more):
- Makati City and Pasig, Philippines, 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Manhattan, N.Y. 202 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Miami, Fla. 155 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Anaheim and Santa Ana, Calif. 147 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 141 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Tel Aviv, Israel 139 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Manchester, England 114 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Milan, Italy 108 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Cebu City, Philippines 99 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- George Town, Malaysia 95 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- San Francisco, US: 91 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Oslo, NO: 89 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Boston, US: 88 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Newark, US: 84 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Honolulu, US: 82 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Baguio, PH: 82 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Paris, FR: 80 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Denpasar, ID: 75 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Leeds, GB: 72 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
- Las Vegas, US: 72 selfie-takers per 100,000 people
If those numbers strike you as a bit low, that's because of the way Time measured the number of people. They used the Instagram API to download every image that was tagged "selfie" and had geolocational data over two 24 hour periods. So if there was a selfie without a GPS marker, it wasn't included. From there, they were able to figure out a percentage of population taking those photos, and what cities they lived in.
If you're interested in more number crunching on the selfie movement, check out the Selfiecity project, which did a lot more analysis of how people take selfies in different major metropolitan areas.
(via DIYPhotography)