How many dancers who attend tango marathons and encuentros are there? A difficult question to answer, especially when one has no data.
What data do we have? Tango Marathon Directory doesn’t use invasive tracking tools (for GDPR reasons, for sure), but we have some data.
The Facebook Page (link)
TMD has 6237 followers as of June 17th 2023, thereof 64% women and 36% men, according to Facebook. Depending on the age category group, this translates into a ratio of women to men of about 2.5 below the age of 44, 1.8 between 45 and 54, and about 1.2 above the age of 55. This is of course if people don’t lie about their age on facebook.
How many dancers are there?
Using the likes of TMD as reference
My rough guess is always: between 10k and 20k dancers in Europe who travel for events like tango marathons or encuentros. Possibly double that if we take the people who attend tango festivalitos and tango festivals, as well.
I think this also fits with the numbers from the TMD page. Let’s assume only 80% of all marathon dancers like TMD as a page, and only 80% of those have a facebook account, we have ~10k marathon dancers. If they make up 80% of the group of dancers who attend marathons and encuentros, we get a total of ~12k dancers in that group.
The table below plays a bit with the percentages. Look into the third row, where 60% fractions are taken: the total group of dancers attending marathons or encuentros then is ~29k in Europe. Maybe that’s a bit too many, but maybe that’s just right. What do you think?
Alternative approach by the number of events on TMD
Let’s take a different approach based on rough guesses. We have, on average, three marathons and encuentros listed on TMD for every weekend. This sums up to 150 events per year. If only 60% of events are listed on TMD, we have 250 marathons/encuentros per year. On average, we assume that 180 dancers attend these events, with encuentros being smaller and marathons being a bit larger than that, on average. This brings us to 45k dancers attending events per year. Most dancers attend more than one event per year, so the number is actually much less. If every dancer would only attend 2 events, we have 22k, and when everyone on average attends 4 events we only have 11k dancers.
Summary
Both ways to guesstimate the number of dancers who attend marathons and encuentros come to a similar range: somewhere between 10k and 20k dancers.
What do we need to learn for better guesstimates?
- What is the real proportion between likes of TMD and actually attending these events?
- What is the real proportion of dancers having/using facebook?
- What is the proportion of dancers attending either marathons or encuentros, or both?
- What is the actual distribution of the number of events a dancer participates per year?