I’m a sitter. I’ve often wondered how many sits other sitters (i.e. my potential competitors when I’m applying for a sit), on the site have done. The question has been posed elsewhere on the forum, but THS does not publish statistics for unknown reasons (probably because they’re too busy responding to user inquiries and probably not because the information is considered confidential).
To satisfy my curiosity I clicked on “find a sitter” and recorded the number of sits completed / reviews for each sitter profile that was shown. I did the same for a total of 18 pages of sitter profiles (i.e. 432 profiles in total). Here’s what I found:
31% of profiles have zero reviews
14% of profiles have 1 review
8% of profiles have 2 reviews
10% of profiles have 3 reviews
7% of profiles have 4 reviews
16% of profiles have 5 to 9 reviews
8% of profiles have 10 to 19 reviews
5% of profiles have 20 to 29 reviews
1% of profiles have 30 or more reviews
Some interpretation that should encourage newer sitters:
If you have 3 or more reviews, more than half of your competitors for a sit probably have fewer reviews than you do.
If you have 5 or more reviews, more than 2/3 of your competitors for a sit probably have fewer reviews than you do.
I’m not sure the 18 pages of profiles I checked represent a random sample, in fact I’m pretty sure it is NOT random. The reason I stopped after 18 pages is that I realized I was seeing some profiles multiple times on multiple pages. However, the profiles I noticed seeing often had 5 or more reviews, which means that the true numbers are more heavily weighted by profiles with lower review counts and that THS sprinkles in profiles with 5 or more reviews in order to make the sitter population seem more experienced than it actually is.
Hi @Ruckusfan. Interesting statistics. Thanks for sharing. I’m going to alert the tech team about the fact that you found sitters listed more than once, as that’s not supposed to happen as far as I know. Thanks again for sharing the results of your analysis.
Thanks, Karen. However, a higher priority, in my opinion, would be for the tech team to fix the search function sitters use when searching for sits. The results displayed by those searches are abysmal! That search function should get fixed first because it is used a lot more often than home owners searching for sitters. FWIW.
That’s quite some research you have done! Would not have expected your results but maybe it’s the same as with a gym membership: a lot of people sign up, few ever go. House sitting sounds great but it’s certainly not for everyone, maybe some realized that only after signing up (and of course getting your first sit is quite hard and people might just give up).
That’s indeed very interesting! I have 12 reviews now and I’ve noted a big difference in the responses I get when I apply for sits now. I became a member in June this year and in the beginning some applications got ignored… now almost everyone replies and more of the replies are positive (asking for a chat or even accepting straight away). In fact, I applied for a sit near me a few minths ago and got no reply, and this time they accepted me after just a few messages exchanged. It’s definitely great to see that my passion and commitment are being appreciated
Very interesting. We too are in the top 1% with almost 50 5-star reviews. Recent policy changes are trying to even that out however by ensuring we don’t even get a look in for many of our preferred locations.
I’m over it. There are exhausting work-arounds and we’ll get sits in areas we want to visit eventually. But the changes are still a big mistake regarding promoting bad behaviors IMO.
Yes and there isn’t a filter for homeowners to use to find the more experienced sitters. Perhaps THS prefer to prioritise the listings for less experienced sitters. Fair enough but we all had to start somewhere.
If I mention it by name my comments will get moved to the locked discussion where you won’t be able to comment. One of @Twitcher 's has already been moved there a few xomments up. Follow that link.
@Ruckusfan We are also in the top 1% (58 sits)
I recently (just for fun!) looked through all 500+ sitters thumbnails for my home town and there were only 5 of us with more than 30 sits so that matches your statistics perfectly!
