kamichan.com

As you may or may not know, Google offers a whole range of funny, interesting, and more or less useful little tools. One of them is Google Insights, which shows you the popularity of any given serch term, and it even lets you compare various search terms. I played around with it a little, and what I found out was quite interesting. I compared the terms “Ya-Ya-yah“, “Hey! Say! JUMP“, “Nakayama Yuma“, and “B.I.Shadow” over the last couple of years, and here are the results:

It has to be noted that these results are not an indicator for popularity. Instead they show the interest Internet users show for the respective search term. E.g. if you’ve been a Hey!Say!JUMP fan for 2 years you will most likely not google “Hey!Say!JUMP” because you pretty much already know all about them and you know most of the relevant websites. Somebody who googles “Hey!SayJUMP” most likely doesn’t know a whole lot about them and wants to find out more. That’s why they conduct a search.

As you can see the search volume for Ya-Ya-yah (red) peaked in March 2005, at the time when they had their two Yokohama Arena concerts and when season 7 of Kinpachi Sensei came to an end. Since then things have pretty much been going downhill.

Searches for Hey!Say!JUMP (blue) reached two major peaks, the first in November 2007 and the second in May 2008, both when they got lots of TV exposure because they were doing volleyball support. Which is just another indicator that these searches were done by non-fans, or not-yet-fans. People saw them on TV and had no idea who they were, so they asked Google.

And then of course at the right end of the chart you see the surge in queries for Nakayama Yuma (yellow) and B.I.Shadow (green) when their debut was announced earlier this month.

Now here comes the interesting part: this chart is for worldwide searches. If you limit the query to searches from Japan only the graphs look pretty much the same, except Yuma is missing. That’s of course because Japanese people don’t search for “Nakayama Yuma“, they search for “中山優馬”. So I replaced the Latin spelling with the Kanji spelling, and the result was quite scary:

Whoopsie!

In May (i.e. after Koishite Akuma ~ Vampire Boy was announced) Yuma generated almost 3 times the Google search volume that Hey!Say!JUMP did when they debuted in November 2007. In June, when the NYwBIS debut was announced, he increased that factor to 12.5!

Again, it’s not an indicator of popularity but one of interest. In how far he’ll be able to convert that interest into TV ratings and CD sales remains to be seen. However, while the person in charge at JE probably doesn’t use Google Insights he or she is probably very insightful nonetheless. When Koishite Akuma was announced and fan- and media-interest suddenly went through the roof the only logical thing to do was to let Yuma debut with the theme song. Not him alone (when did Johnny’s last debut a solo artist?). But also not in a group where he gets lost in the crowd. It’s the name Nakayama Yuma that sparks this huge interest. From a marketing standpoint that name has to stand out in the name of the new group, and his face has to stand out on the CD cover because it’s him who will generate a major part of the sales.

Think of JE what you want, but they know what they’re doing, and their decisions – as strange as they may seem to us at first – do make sense.

No “I don’t like it” comments please. I don’t like doing the dishes. But there are some things in life one just has to put up with.

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