Trade Me Users Have Spoken: Wellington is the cultural capital of New Zealand

The whole cultural capital ‘debate’ has got a little bit out of hand.

Responding to Metro magazine’s article (which pretty much says Wellington is the best place to visit for cultural stuff if you actually read it so we are quite pleased with them) started out as a bit of Friday afternoon fun for Positively Wellington Tourism.

We didn’t really expect anyone to pick the release up, which is probably why word spread like Auckland city’s footprint. Breakfast, Close Up (where were you when we needed you TV3?), More FM, Kiwi FM, the Dominion Post, the New Zealand Herald and the Sunday Star Times have all covered the story – to name but a few.

While we think it’s probably time to move on to bigger issues like, say, how Wellington should be made the capital of absolutely positively everything in the world, we couldn’t resist telling you about the results from a Trade Me poll that asked ‘Where is New Zealand’s cultural capital?’.

The poll, which finished at exactly 7.50am this morning, saw New Zealand’s capital of cool nab 58% of the 2359 votes*. Auckland got less than half of Wellington’s votes – 626 or 27%. Christchurch, Dunedin and dear old Hamilton (81 votes!) got a 7%, 4% and 3% piece of the pie respectively.

Trade Me gets about 450,000 unique visitors a day. In total they serve 67% of all the pages viewed on the New Zealand internet. We figure you can’t get more authoritative than the country’s most used website – even if people were probably voting when they should have been working. Given Auckland has a lot more people than Wellington the odds should have been in their favour, but Wellington won by a fair few horses’ noses.

The people have spoken.

End of story.

* For the record we didn’t send the link to people to get them to vote.