Just for kicks, I looked up several martial arts related topics on Google Trends. here are some of the results that were especially interesting to me. The blue line is aikido, the red line is judo. It appears that judo maintains a moderate and level trend over time with a single spike in popularity - I guess each four years coincident with the Olympics. Aikido is trending steadily downward in popularity but what is really odd is a surge in interest in aikido during the third quarter of each year (magnified below). What's going on there, I wonder. Anyway,
the orange and green lines in the graph above are UFC and MMA, respectively. UFC appears to have a huge spike in interest around each event as well as a strong upward trend. The green MMA line starts low and surpasses all the others except UFC.
Interesting. It'd be interesting to see demographics breakdowns of that info, too. For example, by age group.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder where all this MMA stuff is heading in the next 20-30 years...what's your take?
The blue line is easy to interpret.
ReplyDeleteThe downward trend is a result of Seagal's movies disappearing from theatres, whereas each spike represents one of his straight-to-video releases. :D
Would you share your blog stats with us as well? Especially in regard to proportion from search engines versus proportion from network referrals?
ReplyDeleteColin, in the past year I've had about 14000 unique visitors, about 4500 of whom were from search engines, so roughly 1/3 of my unique visitors appear to come from search engines.
ReplyDeleteAll my blog stats are public. You can scroll tothe bottom of the page and click on the "BF Mapstats" button to see my stats.
Anonymous Dude, give me a few days to come up with something good to say about the MMA trends and I'll be glad to post on that.
Ha, Chris, that's funny, but there could be something to that.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that due to the popularity of aikido in universities (roughly 10% of all aikido google hits are university aikido hits too) maybe there's a surge in folks checking it out every fall because of the start of the enrollment year. That's sort of how it works at MSU but I'm not sure about in other places.
Most optimised websites have 60-70% traffic from search engines. Blogs seem to hang around 30% +/-. You're getting about 3 times more page views than I'm getting. That's respectable. Colin
ReplyDeleteVery cool idea!
ReplyDelete