Where have people gone after CouchSurfing became subscriber-only?

Upvote:0

Impossible to know many active members are on CS, but searching for recent logins shows poor results in most locations (recent logins < 6 months/reply rate). BeWelcome.org has 200,000 members, and do a annual clean up, that turns profiles with non-functioning email address/ lack of logins to inactive in search. 200,000 means you are likely, when using the right approach (personalized messages, full profile) find a host in most locations. Of Couse, no paywall/ no ads/ no verification fee/ registered charity/ volunteer based are the bonus points.

Upvote:3

A partial answer based on, well, claims on the CouchSurfing subreddit and other gossip here-and-there:

  • Indeed, BeWelcome.org seems to be the most common alternative people have chosen.
  • Couchers.org was started recently, with the CS paywall coming up. It may have more users than you might expect for a new initiative which is still in beta.
  • The number of users on TrustRoots has increased significantly, and is now apparently 60K.
  • It's possible that more people stayed on CouchSurfing than I expected, and have been willing to pay. But there isn't any meaningful evidence to back this possibility.

Finally, one needs to remember than the number of CS users was likely inflated. That is, many accounts were likely tombstones; and I've heard it argued that quite a few account were bot-created, although I haven't seen any evidence to support this claim. It is not easy (for me) to estimate how many active users CS had when it had 12M registered users overall.

More post

Search Posts

Related post