Its been a really busy week this week, i’ve been playing tour guide and i’m off to Europe early next week. In my spare time today I was able to check up on various rankings of the dating industry.
The overture data has shown a steady rise in searches for plentyoffish over the last 6 months, now behind only Match.com in the US market. Hitwise just released their data set which comes from over 20 million users surfing history. ISP’s send hitwise their data every night and 2 of the top 5 search terms in the dating industry are related to plentyoffish.com in the US.
This chart shows trends over the last few months based on overtures keyword data. MSN search banned my site for a few weeks hence my drop in may.
I’ve found that domain name searches reflect the true indication of a sites traffic. For things like economic indicators its even more accurate as the information is nearly real time. People searching for homes corresponds extremely well to housing starts. Americansingles.com decline of 20%+ subscribers per quarter is reflected in the decrease in their domain searches. There will come a time when traders, banks etc pay more attention to keyword search data then government housing stats and other economic reports that are months out of date. I predict in the next 5 years search data such as trends in search terms like “buy new home” will have major impact and move markets and reports on housing starts will do nothing.
September 17, 2006 at 7:39 am |
Great insight Markus. Enjoy Europe, I’ll be travelling around Europe myself next year.
September 18, 2006 at 3:05 am |
[...] Markus Frind, the founder and sole proprietor of the massively successful online dating site Plenty of Fish, has an interesting theory in one of his recent posts. The post is mostly about how Markus’s site ranks compared to other international dating sites (answer: number three), but the interesting part for me was right at the end, where Markus says that searches for info on new homes correlates extremely well with real economic data such as housing starts. His theory: There will come a time when traders, banks etc pay more attention to keyword search data then government housing stats and other economic reports that are months out of date. I predict in the next 5 years search data such as trends in search terms like “buy new home” will have major impact and move markets and reports on housing starts will do nothing. [...]
September 19, 2006 at 2:35 am |
Since I first read this post I have found two interesting things. The first was a blogger suggesting that because of Google’s request for an SEC exemption to the investment Company Act of 1940 (that basically regulates them as a mutual fund due to huge cash holdings), Google could essentially become a hedge fund making purchases based on its data.
The second thing was an article where the writer used Google Trends data to track the hype of investments. He found that silver and tech stocks had wild fluctuations in search volume while gold stocks remained relatively steady. I think he wanted to make the point that gold wasn’t wildly overpriced due to media hype.
Bottom line, Google’s data is one of their most valuable assets — even more so than PPC. The question, does that mean its a company worth owning or a company with a gigantic red X painted on them for government intervention?
October 6, 2006 at 3:27 pm |
That, dear sir, is a truly excellent point. And I think it going to come alot sooner than we think.
April 8, 2011 at 11:20 pm |
oMMmjo Very true! Makes a change to see someone spell it out like that.
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October 12, 2006 at 8:45 pm |
If a name is very popular and used as a synonyme the name sells itself (like ebay)
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November 21, 2009 at 11:33 am |
the author makes a good valid point here on the stats – thanks for the info