BikeRadar ran a pretty entertaining article about Google Trends today. Evan Cycles out of the UK has been looking at Google Trends and compared those results with their own sales figures. Looking at the numbers it appears that mountain biking is losing ground. If one looks at those Google Trends charts this trend is clearly noticeable. Fewer folks are searching for “mountain bikes”. But who fires up their web browser, and searches for “mountain bikes” on Google? Obviously only someone who has never thrown their leg across an MTB and someone who neither knows that market nor its brands. Alright, during the past couple of years fewer folks looked for information about a sport they know nothing about. Fair enough! Well, while we’re at it, we can obviously not forget to include “29ers”. And sure enough, since mid 2005 there’s a clear rise in interest in big wheels. Also interesting is the extremely flat line for “e-bikes”. As every manufacturer seems to be jumping on that bandwagon, “e-bikes” don’t seem to have tickled consumers’ interest very much.
And what about brands? Well, looks like Trek has been beating everyone else for the last couple of years, followed by Specialized. And look at Niner. From the second half of 2007, there have been enough queries for “niner bikes” to be included in Google Trends.
The above charts just capture a microscopic snapshot of all search queries by people looking for bicycles, so it’s sort of silly to try to read any trends. A lot more data would need to be analyzed to do that. It’s fun nonetheless, isn’t it?
★ collideous