June 09, 2008

iPhone website reaches a new high as rumour mill goes into overdrive

Apple is expected to launch a new version of its iPhone at the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference in San Francisco this afternoon (UK time). As with all such events, the speculation amongst Apple fans and foes has almost reached fever pitch. Last week UK Internet visits to the iPhone website reached a new high. In fact, there were over twice the number of visits last week than during any of previous peaks, including the initial announcement, UK launch and recent price cut.

Looking at the latest search term suggestions report for ‘iphone’, 4 of the top 10 entries relate to an updated version: ‘new iphone’, ‘3g iphone’, iphone 3g’ and ‘iphone 2’. As the second chart below the table illustrates, the volume searches for each of these terms have increased significantly over the last few weeks.

The biggest recipients of traffic from these searches to date have been news and blog sites, which is understandable when you consider that no product has actually yet been announced, and everything at this point is still speculation. The Times newspaper has optimised itself well for these terms, and was the top recipient of (100% organic) traffic for both ‘3g iphone’ and ‘new iphone’. Interestingly, most of the traffic from the former went to the technology section, while the latter term performed better for the business section.

Update (Tuesday 10 June): As anticipated, Steve Jobs did indeed unveil a new 3G iPhone yesterday. And as predicted, the iPhone site shot up the ranking again. Yesterday it reached a new peak and was the 290th most visited site in the UK overall.

Of course, the blogosphere loved this story and yesterday blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media. The three blogs sending most traffic were Mac Rumors, Endgadget and The Unoffical Apple Weblog, while the BBC was the highest ranked traditional media site.

Posted by Robin Goad at 02:00 PM
Posted to Blogs | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds

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