Edmonton’s Capital EX wrapped up yesterday. Sharon and I visited on Thursday evening and had a good time. Today Northlands released the attendance numbers, and though slightly lower than previous years, the ten-day festival still recorded an impressive 717,966 visits. I had been looking forward to the final numbers, so that I could compare it with previous years.
Here are the attendance numbers for the last ten years (you can download the raw data below):
Though much of the data is missing, I was able to track down some numbers going all the way back to 1879:
After getting this information, I decided to compare it to the population of Edmonton for the same time periods. Here is the comparison for the last ten years:
And the same comparison starting in 1879:
A couple things to note about the data in this post:
- The event changed from Klondike Days (adopted in 1962) to Capital EX in 2006. This explains the large drop that year.
- The event was a six-day fair from 1912 to 1967, and a ten-day fair thereafter (I think, certainly for the last 20 years or so it has been). I haven’t adjusted the figures for this.
- The population data, which comes from the City of Edmonton, doesn’t account for surrounding communities.
Download the Capital EX Attendance & Edmonton Population data in CSV
Sources: iNews880, CBC, Edmonton Journal, Amusement Business (1, 2, 3, 4), City of Edmonton, Capital EX Fair History
MasterMaq's Blog 
How does the name change in 2006 explain the drop? Did they start counting differently?
No, from what I gather (reading news articles, I don’t really remember) the drop was due to confusion about and general dislike for the name and format change.
The drop after the name change makes perfect sense to me. I haven’t been to the midway since it was actually called K-Days. I’m just surprised the drop was so dramatic.
I hate the “Capital Ex”, but I love K-Days. I still go to K-days every year, and scorn the “Capital Ex”. 😀
I’d be interested to see the daily figures, just to see how many people came on a day to day basis, the fact you fit the entire population of Edmonton into those grounds – even over 10 days – is pretty incredible.
the drop is due to the name change when we got rid of the klondike days theme they lost alot of attendance please bring back the theme
Don’t know if they’d be at all related, but in 2006, the Calgary Stampede set its yet-to-be-broken attendance record.