Google Trends Update on Scrapbooking (& Creative Memories)

Four months ago I did an article talking about what Google Trends revealed about the scrapbook industry’s health. Let’s take a look at what Google says has happened to the scrapbook industry in the last four months…and if it says anything about what happened to Creative Memories.

The top part of the chart above shows global Google searching for the terms “scrapbook” and “scrapbooking” in the past few years. As I discussed last time, search volume for those terms in 2008 has been much lower than in previous years. The usual pattern of volume over the course of the year has been barely visible – no significant summer spike, for instance. It does look like scrapbooking will be getting something of its usual year-end boost but it is too early to tell how much of one.

The global chart assembles searches from many different countries where the scrapbooking markets are very different. Breaking the trends down by country provides some valuable information. Below is the chart for just U.S. searches for the same period:

Looking at this chart, it is evident that each year’s high point the past several years has been just a little bit lower, and the low point just a little bit lower, than the previous year. Overall, the chart trends down from left to right. This year, the chart trends dramatically down – a sure reflection of the recession that the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed yesterday started last December.

Note that although the year 2007 started out fairly close in trend to 2006, it trended steadily downward in the last quarter until the holiday spike, instead of hitting an autumn leveling-off – probably due to the economy. And after the holiday spike, 2008 has trended pretty steadily downward, staying at best level at times that searches usually trend up. That is a recession in action on the scrapbook industry.

How are other countries, where the trend of scrapbooking is at a different stage in its lifecycle, faring? The UK didn’t even have measurable traffic on the term for the whole year of 2004, and their traffic chart doesn’t show the specific patterning of the U.S. searches. Traffic on the term “scrapbooking” has declined significantly in the past year, possibly due to the economy there as well, although “scrapbook” remains steady. (But searches for the term scrapbook can be caused by other searches that are not craft related.)

Here is the UK chart:

The French chart (pictured below) is very interesting because it shows something very different from any of the other trend charts I came up with – a very distinct bell curve that showed scrapbooking searches peaking around the holidays of 2006-2007 and slowly declining since then. But they are back on the rise again in the past few months, reversing that trend when the rest of the world seems to be going down in response to factors such as the economy. I’d love to hear from any readers who have knowledge of the French or European market who could explain this phenomenon.

Australia is another place that has had a hot scrapbook market. According to its chart, the market there peaked even earlier than the one in France, peaking at holiday time in 2005/2006. That actually coincides with what looks to be the highest point of the US market as well, according to the Google Trends data.

So, can Google Trends shed any light on what happened to Creative Memories? Let’s take a look!

It appears, looking at the global trends graph for Creative Memories that they peaked about the same time general scrapboking searches did in the 2005/2006 holiday period. Since then, the trend has been generally downward for Creative Memories, just like for scrapbooking in general:

The downward trend for Creative Memories is very pronounced in the U.S. since the start of 2007:

The bottom part of the chart is news reports containing the search term. The spike on the extreme right, at the end of 2008, is obviously caused by news reports on the company’s Chapter 11 filing. The spike in usage of the company’s name as a search term at the same time is also certainly bankruptcy news-related.