Currently, Bitcoin is on a trajectory that could enable it to surpass the highs it had reached in the bull market of 2017. With nearly every metric going up, it appears that more and more people are keeping tabs on Bitcoin online. Earlier this week, investment platform eToro’s senior marketing manager, Brad Michelson, confirmed that there was an increase in Bitcoin’s search volumes. Michelson cited data from the SEMRush, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) platform, he said that global monthly searches for the leading cryptocurrency had reached 8.9 million. These numbers were compared by the marketing expert to those seen in November 2017, which should a rise of 365%.
A significant discrepancy was highlighted by Michelson when the results were compared to that of Google Trends. He said that the Google Trends data didn’t show that the global monthly volume for Bitcoin was actually lower in December 2017 than what can be seen in November 2020. However, it should be noted that metrics are counted differently by Google Trends, as opposed to platforms like SEMRush. Interest is plotted against time by the tracker, and each search term is assigned an interest core between the range of 0 and 100. A value is given to every term, which depicts assumed popularity.
If the Google Trends data is taken into account, the popularity of Bitcoin had peaked at 100 between December 17th and December 23rd, the same time when the asset had reached its all-time high. Currently, the term has logged a score of 18, which suggests that fewer people are keeping track of the asset. However, the service also went on to say that the data about the popularity value is incomplete for now. According to Google Trends data, the most searches for Bitcoin are coming out of Nigeria. As a matter of fact, the African country is the only one on the trends list with a popularity score of 100.
The other two positions are taken up by Ghana and South Africa, with scores of 70 and 59, respectively. This one again goes to show that interest in crypto is the strongest in the African continent. Michelson explained that this discrepancy occurred because data showed by Google Trends is only based on a single keyword. Hence, anyone who searches for ‘Bitcoin’ will only get results for the word’s popularity. There are exclusive scored searches for ‘Bitcoin to Dollar’ and ‘Bitcoin price’ according to Google Trend and the tracker shows that their popularity scores are 33 and 18, respectively.
Interestingly, the two countries that have the highest search counts for these two terms are South Africa and Nigeria. Keeping SEMRush data in mind, it is understandable that there was a rise in ‘Bitcoin’ searches. The market has significantly matured after Bitcoin fell from the price tag of $19,700 in 2017. It appears that weak investors who only saw Bitcoin as a get-rich-quick scheme have been weeded out. Today’s market appears to be a lot more mature, more surveilled, restrained, orderly and financialized and a lot less reflexive than it was.