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Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

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Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby palmbeacher » Tue Aug 09, 2016 1:03 pm

We are often less guessing about the size of the kiteboarding market and popularity of brands.

If Google tells us anything based on their search trends, overall interest for Kitesurfing has been declining 10 years in a row! The searches seem to be seasonal and mostly come from Europe, North America and Australia (no surprise here).

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Looking at the popularity of the brands, Cabrinha is the number 1. However the overall number of are declining, so this could point to a shrinking market (no wonder they raised their prices this year again).

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Surprisingly hydrofoil only has seen a small bump in popularity over the past couple of years.

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While surfing is also on the decline, Stand Up Paddle has taken over Kitesurfing in number of search terms.

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Check it out for yourself here: https://www.google.com/trends/

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby dylan* » Tue Aug 09, 2016 1:16 pm

Looks to me like people are losing interest in all sports :D

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby skyhooked » Tue Aug 09, 2016 1:21 pm

Searches may have dropped off as social media rises - no need to search for your sports when you are bombarded with messages on FB, Twitter, Instagram and all the other channels.

Triathlon, Crossfit were also dropping...I'd guess for the reasons above as it seems like they're more popular now than ever. Running curiously is still trending upwards.

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby palmbeacher » Tue Aug 09, 2016 2:13 pm

@skyhooked: if that were the case the total of number of Google searches would also have to decline. Google now handles at least 2 trillion searches per year, compared to 73 billion in 2004...

1999: one billion per year (based on three million searches per day in August 1999, as reported by John Battelle in his great book, The Search. The figures, I’m fairly certain, came directly from Google, which was more open back then when needing to prove its growth story)
2000: 14 billion (based on 18 million searches per day for the first half of 2000 and 60 million for the second half, from figures reported by Battelle. It’s not a perfect estimate, but it’s the best I can figure)
2001–2003: 55 billion+ (based on reports by Google for its Zeitgeist in 2001, 2002 and 2003)
2004–2008: 73 billion (based on Google saying it was doing 200 million searches per day in 2004. After that, it said only “billions” in Google Zeitgeist for 2005 and 2007, with nothing said for 2006 or 2008)
2009: 365 billion+ (A Google blog post in 2009 said Google was doing more than one billion searches per day, then silence for 2010 and 2011)
2012–2015: 1.2 trillion (based on a 100-billion-per-month figure Google released during a special press briefing on search in 2012. Google repeated this figure in 2015, when expressing it as three billion searches per day)
2016: two trillion+

http://searchengineland.com/google-now- ... ear-250247

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby BrunoC » Tue Aug 09, 2016 2:29 pm

The best way to assess the market is to look at revenue and units sold and trend that data.

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby Toby » Tue Aug 09, 2016 3:46 pm

Strange numbers...for sure we have now more kiters than 2004.

But maybe the search words got different?

Back then not many knew what it is...nowadays almost everyone knows it...

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby edt » Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:19 pm

Toby wrote:Strange numbers...for sure we have now more kiters than 2004.

But maybe the search words got different?

Back then not many knew what it is...nowadays almost everyone knows it...
Toby check out palmbeacher's response that explains it. Google had 75 billion searches in 2004 and 2 trillion now. The amount of searches for kiteboarding could be 100 times more than in 2004 and it would still show a decline. Google does these graphs on a relative basis not an absolute one, so unless you are expanding exponentially you will show a decline. Simple linear growth, say adding 100,000 per year shows up as a decline. bruno has the right idea get the company financials, but of course every sales number is secret in the kiteboarding world. So all we can do is guestimate.

I've run these guestimates before, and I think the last time I did it, I got numbers of something like 2 million kiters worldwide right now (depending on how you define what a kiter is) and we add about 100,000 kiters every year.

The google searches (that slow linear decline) seem to agree with this sort of linear growth
Last edited by edt on Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby palmbeacher » Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:26 pm

@edt: you are right, I assumed incorrectly they were absolute...

Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various language

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby edt » Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:36 pm

there's also a problem with your graph above. You are comparing for instance "cabrinha" which can mean cabrinha hats or news on the founder with for instance "slingshot kiteboarding" instead of just slingshot. Then there is the problem of "best" no way to do a good search on that.

I think the only thing you can do to get a meaningful comparison against vendors is pick out the vendors best selling kite and then graph that against each company's kite. However when you do this, for instance a search of cabrinha switchblade kiteboarding against north rebel kiteboarding, there aren't enough hits for google to plot a trends. If on the other hand you try "cabrinha kiteboarding" against "slingshot kiteboarding" and "north kiteboarding" you will get lines that look almost identical, with some wild swings right at the beginning of the sport.

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Re: Google Trends: Kitesurfing's popularity in decline?

Postby edt » Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:45 pm

really the best use for google trends is to search something like "pokemon go" google trends is a good way to figure out if it's dying yet. And from google trends we can easily see that pokemon go peaked on July 16th. It's trending down which is a good thing. I've had enough of people walking around bumping into things and crossing traffic with their eyes glued to the cell phone. It's like that mall scene in dawn of the dead by romero.

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anyway that's the real use of google trends. You want to be able to spot these peaks and when the search term starts to decline. Could be of some use to spot certain kiteboarding trends, but I don't think it's that useful to gauge overall popularity.


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