The Filipino spirit of constant sharing of enthusiasm has come a long way. This time, in a worldwide scope by beating other beauty and celebrity obsessed countries and cities around the world in claiming the title of Time Magazine’s “Selfie Capital of the World”. Particularly, Makati City, which is known as the “Financial Center of the Philippines”, can now add to their achievements this new distinction.
Photo by Lloyd Chua of lloydandbehold.com
In order to identify the geography with the most number of selfies taken, TIME created a database with more than 400,000 Instagram photos which were tagged as “selfie” with geographic coordinates in them. Four hundred fifty-nine cities were ranked in order to determine the selfie-st places in the planet and guess what, Makati City and Pasig City, Philippines bagged the first place with 258 selfie takers per 100,000 people while Cebu City earned the 9th place with 99 selfie-takers per 100,000 people. The selfies uploaded were downloaded from the Instagram API from January 28 to February 2 and March 3 – 7, 2014. In such time, 402,197 Instagram photos tagged “selfie” that included geographic coordinates. It is given that these are only a small part of the selfies uploaded since some of the photos did not include locations in them. The data were calculated by the number selfies taken within 5 miles and divided by the population of the city with at least 250,000 residents. While this method may not accurately measure the target outcome as it tends to favor regions just outside major urban areas, this is by far the most comprehensive means of comparing all 459 cities.
Selfie photo by Lloyd Chua of lloydandbehold.com
Here are 9 other cities around the world that came after Makati and Pasig City:
The Philippines being hailed as the “Selfie Capital” is no surprise at all. With a great number of travel destinations and fun times to spend with families and friends, Filipinos have found a new venue to socialize with one another.
