Following bitcoin’s incredible performance and increased media coverage during 2017, there is no doubt that bitcoin has witnessed increased user adoption. Estimates regarding the scale of bitcoin’s growth vary due to the anonymous nature of bitcoins transactions; however, the search engine traffic for terms such as ‘bitcoin’ are generally seen as a reliable indicator of the growth in bitcoin’s user adoption. The most recent figures made available by Google indicate an increase in searches for prominent keywords relating to bitcoin of many hundreds of percent when comparing data from 2016 and 2017, whilst bitcoin became the ninth most visited page on Wikipedia during last year – indicating a significant increase in bitcoin user adoption.
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On Wikipedia, Bitcoin Was the Ninth Most Visited Page for 2017
According to Wikipedia’s annual report the 50 most visited pages on the website, bitcoin ranked ninth for 2017. The report describes bitcoin as “the much-hyped ‘future of money’”, adding that the world’s first cryptocurrency “has turned into the most speculative intangible asset of all time.” The report states that the page was visited 15,026,561 times during 2017.
Traffic for bitcoin’s Wikipedia page peaked on the 8th of December – when BTC experienced a dramatic retracement of approximately 20%, falling from the then all-time high of $17,171 USD on Bitfinex, before bouncing off the approximately $14,000 area. Despite bitcoin’s meteoric price performance during 2017, the Wikipedia report recognizes some of bitcoin’s shortcomings that emerged during the year – stating that bitcoin “prov[ed] totally unsuitable as a means of payment” due to the controversy surrounding the scaling issues that have plagued BTC throughout the year.
Google Searches for Bitcoin Reach Record Highs
The volume of Google searches conducted for prominent keywords pertaining to bitcoin has also produced dramatic growth – with the latest data from Google indicating that numerous major keyword groupings received between one million and ten million searches each month on average during 2017. The data indicates that monthly searches relating to the keywords ‘bitcoin price’ saw an increase of over 1,000% on average during January 2017 to December 2017 when compared with data from the previous year, whilst searches pertaining to ‘bitcoin chart’ increased by 934%, and searches for ‘bitcoin USD’ increased by more than 800%. Google estimates that each of the aforementioned keyword groupings received between 1 and 10 million searches on average each month during 2017 – a significant increase compared to the 100,000 and 1,000,000 monthly searches Google estimates were conducted each month during 2016.
A large number of dominant keyword groupings pertaining to bitcoin received between 100,000 and 1,000,000 searches monthly last year. Among those that experienced the highest growth when compared with 2016 were ‘current bitcoin’ – for which searches increased by 895.9%, ‘btc price’ – which increased by 828.5%, sell bitcoins – gaining in volume by 626.5%, bitcoin miner – up 590.6%, btc rate – up 510.4%, bitcoin calculator – up 471.2%, bitcoin rate – up 461.4%, buy bitcoin – up 273.5%, and bitcoin trading – up 170.9%. Searches for ‘earn bitcoin’ increased by 74.6%. Several notable keywords also grew to receive between 10,000 and 100,000 searches last year, including ‘bitcoin market’ – which increased in search volume by 900%, ‘btc chart’ – searches for which grew by 826.2%, ‘currency bitcoin’ – with searches increasing by 826.1%, ‘purchase bitcoin’ – which increased by 752.5%, and ‘bitcoin account’ – increasing by 291.2%.
Curiously, some of the top keyword groupings that produced the least growth during 2017 included ‘bitcoin mining’ – searches for which grew by 33.6%, ‘bitcoin exchange’ – which grew by 17.5%, and ‘bitcoin wallet’ – which saw a meagre increase in search traffic of only 0.9%.
Do you think that 2018 will yield further increases in search volume for keywords pertaining to bitcoin? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
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