More Google Trends: Digital Scrapbooking & Papercrafting

At the suggestion of a few readers, I decided to widen the Google Trends survey that I did about 10 days ago to take a look at a few more terms: digital scrapbooking & papercrafting. The results were definitely interesting.

First let’s look at the global trend comparison of “scrapbooking” and “digital scrapbooking”. The red line is the trend for the search term “scrapbooking” that was shown in the previous article.

It’s interesting to note that when the chart for the previous article was done, a small upward spike was evident at the end that looked possibly to be the start for this year of the typical holiday season spike for scrapbooking. Enough time has passed now that we can see that it was, in fact, only a small blip and “scrapbooking” has now continued with its nosedive trend for 2008.

The comparison to “digital scrapbooking” is very informative. Digital scrapbooking didn’t even have enough data for a trends record before mid 2004. Since then it has been small compared to the statistics for “scrapbooking” but on a slow, steady climb. Comparing the two charts I don’t see how digital scrapbooking can be blamed for the decline in paper scrapbooking. It looks like “scrapbooking” is falling faster than digital scrapbooking is climbing. Plus, not all people who take up digital scrapbooking are switching from paper, and some scrapbookers are doing both digital and paper.

Would there be benefit to the industry to switching to using the term “papercrafting” instead of “scrapbooking”?

It doesn’t seem like there would currently be much benefit to using the term “papercrafting” from looking at Google Trends. The term doesn’t even register enough searches on Google to create a Google Trends chart. The chart above is for “papercrafts”, and the search volume barely registers on the comparison as a flat line. The data starts in the 3rd quarter of 2006. The large portion of these searches are probably related to Paper Crafts Magazine, not “papercrafting”.

It’s possible that there is potential in the use of the word “papercrafting” but as of right now, it isn’t gaining traction on its own according to Google Trends. The industry would likely have to make a concerted effort to promote the concept if it wants to broaden its reach. It’s not happening from market forces already in action at this point it appears.