BitcoinTalk Lost A Third Of Its Users In February
When the price of Bitcoin showed no sign of another stellar rise, interest quickly waned. Image from Shutterstock.
The BitcoinTalk forum lost a third of its referrals from the bitcoin community in February, according to available traffic data from website analytics firm SimilarWeb.
The old message forum was created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 . The very first bitcoin transaction was negotiated on the BitcoinTalk forum– 10,000 BTC for some pizza.
But February referrals from several cryptocurrency websites and a couple major platforms (like Twitter and Github) declined markedly for BitcoinTalk in February. Their numbers are down by nearly a third in one month.
Google Trends Search Interest in Bitcoin Declines
The decline in outbound referral links to Bitcointalk in February tracks perfectly with a decline in Google Trends. Over the same time period, general interest in Bitcoin has also dropped.
As of Dec 1, 2018 “Bitcoin” search query volume on Google was down 26% since March 18, 2018. It slid all the way to 67% down since March 18, 2018 by February 2, 2019.
Google doesn’t tell us the exact search volume on Google Trends.
AdWords users who place paid ads on Google’s search engine results pages and ad network receive a range of prices. Google values keywords by current active interest.
Still, dropping another half of whatever the Google search volume for “bitcoin” was in March 2018 over just two months, after spending eight months fizzling down by a quarter, seems to be a significant movement in global curiosity about and interest in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, Media, and Market Adoption
The price of Bitcoin steadily declined over 2018 from its Dec 2017 all time high price just shy of $20,000, to a nice, chill, leveled-out price just shy of the $4,000 support level.
The volume of news stories with “Bitcoin” in the headline increased sixfold from June 2017 to November 2017, from 630 news stories in a month, to 3,788 news stories- most of them about the incredible price gains bitcoin was making on its meteoric rise.
This publicity likely drove curiosity and interest in the cryptocurrency, reflected in the increase in Google search volume for “Bitcoin.”
When the price of Bitcoin showed no sign of another stellar rise, interest quickly waned.
Those who won’t buy bitcoin again until they hear about it in Time Magazine will likely miss gains. A massive amount of institutional investment in bitcoin is currently underway.
They will wait until it’s too late because they’ve got the mainstream media wrapped over their eyes like wool and they can’t see what’s going on.
