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Tour de France: Are Americans Still Interested Post Lance?
July 21, 2006
I had some follow-up questions from my previous post on whether the Tour de France Affects Bike Sales. One of the most interesting questions was: What effect did Lance Armstrong's retirement have on American interest in the Tour de France?
Here's a quick analysis. Using search terms as a proxy for interest in both the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong, I charted volume of queries for both phrases, for searches in the US:
US Searches
As you can see from the chart above, there was over 3x the searches for the "Tour de France" during the Tour last year compared to this year. Applying a correlation test between the two phrases during this time period, we find that there is a very strong positive correlation between the two terms. In the interest of establishing causation, I created the same graphs and performed the same correlation tests for other world markets.
Here's a chart for searches on "Lance Armstrong" and the "Tour de France" in the United Kingdom (the two terms showed no correlation during the time period):
UK Searches
As we'd expected, the absence of Lance in the tour has significantly impacted interest here in the states. Next week's question: Can Floyd Landis' miraculous solo attack renew American interests?
Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:02 PM
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Although you checked for a third party country to try and get a corrolation between Lance and tour de France through your figures for the UK - the tour de france was never paticularly popular in the UK.
If you were to do a similar test with a country where cycling was popular anyway, would the figures be similar? A country which might suit your needs could be Denmark or the Netherlands.
Love reading this blog, it gives a real insight into how the world actually thinks!!
Posted by Oli Rhys | July 24, 2006 06:42 AM