I was forwarded this information by a Special Correspondent who pulled it up on Google Analytics.
I thought the information was interesting, though it troubles me there are no numbers on the side of the graphs, so they look kind of like Miscavigerally graphs — though the difference here is that these represent REAL numbers, and they do show TRENDS.
What is remarkable about these graphs is the that they measure interest in topics. I do not profess to know HOW they work this out, presumably based on searches.
You can see, in spite of the “massive international expansion” and the “Public Div phase” in full swing, let alone the opening of new “ideal orgs” and the release of “ideal Intro Routes” and “ideal Basic Books” and the release of all recorded lecture series, the the FART Div 6 and Super Bowl ads and the greatest relief force on planet earth and, and, and… that frankly my dear, nobody gives a damn. In fact, since 2007, this is a steady DOWNTREND, despite spikes when Tom Cruise did something stupid.
As for Miscavige — there doesn’t appear to be much interest in him at any time. Again, except for the spikes when his BFF creates a media frenzy of bad news for Scientology.
Then there is the unemployed, bitter defrocked apostate on the fringe of the internet.
You can see when my blog started in March 2013.
This is an interesting comparative. How much money are they wasting while going NOWHERE?
It sucks to be Miscavige.
If you have not done so, I recommend you read the first part of the story of Andrew and Shelley Jackson at the Scn Africa blog. This is sure to be a fascinating and revealing story.
UPDATE: Someone just sent me screen shots of Alexa rankings. I include them here for info:
Interesting point, Doc, and you could be right. The only part I can’t reconcile with that, though, is why on Earth anybody from India would have the slightest interest in Scientology? There could very well be a reason; I’m just at a loss to find one.
To play devils advocate, we also need to look at statistical bias, that the people searching for “scientology” on the internet are not necessarily representative of the “active scientologist” population.
The CoS viewpoint is that the internet tends to be entheta and “active scientologists” should not generally be searching for Scientology on the internet. The spikes in traffic seem to correlate most heavily with major news stories about Scientology, Tom Cruise in particular. So the google trend rankings are probably more representative of “wog” interest in Scientology than “total” interest in Scientology.
The news spikes suggest lots of people have heard the name “Scientology”, but the majority of the press is bad news. Though if you look closely at the tend chart, and ignore the news spikes, you will see that the baseline for searches on Scientology is also slowly trending downwards. The baseline is likely somewhat correlated to the rate of change within Scientology rather than total membership (number of people thinking of joining, number of people thinking of leaving, number of active members + number of activists).
The best propaganda reading of this is slow steady growth. New people lookup scientology online, join, then stop searching online, to be replaced by a steady stream of new people. Even with this reading, overall growth is slowing.
Another reading is that Scientology is becoming more insular, and engaging less with the internet, except for official PR channels. If half the Scientology queries are from activists, then the other half is from Scientoloists starting to look outside the PR bubble, which would be the first step towards leaving. This reading would suggest that the Church is slowing and steadily getting smaller. The declining interest in Scientology is due to a combination of the church getting smaller (thus fewer people left to leave) and the total internet population getting bigger (relative to Scientology).
Now lets compare Scientology, Dalai Lama, Islam, Anonymous, Pope Francis
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=scientology,+/m/07r1h&cmpt=q&content=1#q=scientology%2C%20%2Fm%2F028g3%2C%20%2Fm%2F0flw86%2C%20%2Fm%2F03nr1np%2C%20%2Fm%2F05ngt2&cmpt=q
Ignoring the news spikes, Scientology has as much attention on it as the Dalai Lama as a one man band. Anonymous peaked in 2012, but still has 2-3x as much attention as Scientology. As for “Worlds Fastest Growing Religion (TM)” even the biggest news stories about Tom Cruise fall well short of the baseline interest in Islam (Christianity not shown has a similar line to Islam). As for celebrity pulling power, Pope Francis is far bigger than To Cruise.
I’ve watched Google Trends for a long while and it sometimes comes up with surprising results. For example the second South Park show on Scientology (the Death of Chef) generated more searches for Scientology than the first.
The big ratings battle used to be on Google’s front page, which has remained the same for a decade with scientology.org, wikipedia and xenu.net in the first three places. The cult tried everything to improve this to no avail, making enemies of Google and Wikipedia in the process.
I thought that you might to see this piece of data that adds to the story. Twitter has an app called Fake people or Faker. http://fakers.statuspeople.com.
Go look at the scores for @Scientology. 10% Fake followers. 71% inactive followers. 19% good followers. Consider that they have 12.4K followers that means that at out of 12,000 supposed followers 10,000 are now inactive or not real. Sort of follows the whole scene doesn’t it
Anybody done a google trend comparison of Miscavige and the actual Pope?
What is David going to do? (This is something I’ve been seriously wondering lately.)
It’s obvious from these stats that interest in the church is close to nonexistent — positive interest, anyway. The only time folks pay attention is when something happens that casts the church in a negative light, like Katie/Tom. Advertising doesn’t help — it just generates complaints on YouTube and snarky threads on Twitter.
So NOBODY is going to walk into those expensive buildings. Plus, there seems to be steady attrition among staff as well as public, which may even have hastened since GAT II. Dave is sitting on a huge pile of money and assets, but the organization itself appears to be all but lifeless.
Is there ANY chance that David would try something new? For example, offering free or discounted services to get people in the door? Or increasing staff pay to stem attrition? I know these ideas seem far-fetched (especially paying the staff, I suppose, since that would involve changing a long-established system).
But the alternative, which seems to be playing out, is to sail on “steady as she goes” while the orgs go broke and Flag empties out and attendance at events continues to plummet. Will Dave really sit there in his command bunker and let this run to its natural conclusion?
Great graphs. Kudos and thanks.
As regards the Super Bowl ad or any ad for that matter from the church, no matter how well done or actual interest these ads may legitimately create the interest will quickly be crushed once a new person is around one of the ideal orgs. The staff is so desperate for stats and cash they can’t help but scare people off with the desperation to get new public to buy books, donate for a course or buy a membership. The staff doesn’t have time to let the person be around the Org. and begin to feel comfortable, have a free session or listen to an inexpensive tape play. Everything is on a right now basis-No waiting to let Scientology sink in and let the person have a few wins.
Several years back my niece walked into the San Diego Org to find out about Scientology after I had spoken to her about it and suggested she visit the Org.. So taking her uncle’s advice she arrived one day only to be greeted by four or five staff all at once gushing all over her about how happy they were to see her. It was completely unreal and overwhelming for her and she never went back.The staff were so desperate to get anyone in they couldn’t relax and back off long enough for her to feel comfortable.
For every 20 people who may actually be interested and arrive to an Org. these days to find out about Scientology today’s staff will have a burn rate of about 19 of them over a short time period.
KFrancis
I had a very similar experience. The staff blew off a genuine reach for Scientology that I sent to them.
It seems staff do not know how to handle new people. A total disconnect from reality because they are in a bubble.
I think people who get “in” today are reading an LRH book(s) and ignoring the staff’s need for money and need for bodies in the shop. Sort of they get “in” in spite of the staff.
Of course their exit is inevitable with GAG II: the neutron bomb in Scientology that leaves the buildings standing and all the people disappeared.
It’s called working Dave’s magic.
I gave up some time ago with taking in genuine reaches…..it was a feckin` goon mostly.Just handled the flow myself as best I could…bet many of you did that?On that last point of 19 out of 20 blowing after first reach…that fig remaining??,about as close to 2,5% as you can get?Makes sense!
The Special Correspondent’s deserve a BIG THANK YOU for helping release the truth about Scientology. Mike – thanks for your blog – it is one of my favorite to get the latest news breaking truthful story about a cult I used to be trapped in!
There are some people that are not involved
in Scientology that should care about Miscavige.
The IRS, FBI, any local authorities where he might
be, Judges and any groups that promote civil rights,
the abolishment of slave labor and freedom of speech.
Wow, that first graph showing the long steady decline of interest in scientology over the last 8 years is really a shocker. If scientologists ever got to see things like this, it would scare the shit out of them. It really shows that the longer they stick with DM and his nutty programs, the less and less the world around them wants to read their bullshit propoganda. Bye bye organized Scientology.
Just updated the post with some Alexa screenshots sent in by a Special Correspondent…
Alexa rankings show a good picture of where you are in relation to Co$. Google Trends just shows what people typed into the Google search engine. So, even if they “searched” for Scientology it does not mean they went to the Co$ sites, they could have just as easily ended up at your site or Tony’s.
For Alexa, the lower the number the higher your rank – you outrank Scientology and are catching up to Tony. The duel is between Tony & Mike – Co$ is eating your dust!
You’re right about the spikes in Scientology searches coinciding with Tom Cruise doing something dumb. You can show both terms in the same graph, actually.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=scientology,+/m/07r1h&cmpt=q&content=1
Mike, I wanted to reply directly to your comment, but could not. I have to say that one of the reasons I read your blog is exactly because of things like this:
“Being honest, I STILL don’t really understand this, but I presume I am not in error in noting the lessening interest in Scientology and virtually no interest in Miscavige?”
You aren’t massaging data to your favor or asserting rightness when you don’t know something, but rather simply being upfront and honest. It’s refreshing.
Also, I wanted to say that one of the missing pieces behind this sort of data is the overwhelmingly negative regard people have for Scientology now.
I hear and see Scientology mentioned randomly by people and it is always negative. It’s the butt of a thousand jokes. And this is a change from a decade or two ago. In the early-mid 90’s, people were more likely to have not heard of Scientology than have a bad opinion of it. People have heard of it now and they do not like it.
It’s clear that ‘interest’ goes up in the wake of a big news story and that ‘interest’ doesn’t necessarily drive people to scientology.org. Based on Shelgold’s information from Alexa, scientology.org has dramatically declined in popularity. Extrapolating from this, it means that the increased searches are driving them to the other websites, which are pretty much all negative.
As far as Miscavige goes, people don’t remember his name. He’s known only as the crazy/abusive leader of that cult.
Congratulations Dave. You’ve managed to ruin the good name of Scientology. Take a win.
Robyn
You are so right.
Being upfront and honest is so refreshing in Scientology.
The name of Scientology is totally screwed thanks to the midget that threw it under the bus to save his tiny little ass, but it lives on in our hearts and souls.
Yeah Dave, swallow that with your fancy Scotch.
Special Announcement to Scientologists
That’s right, you will not be donating to the IAS, Ideal Orgs, Planetary Dissemination or anything else except auditing and training. The millions falsely collected are being used to pay back staff members and those who were bankrupted. COB is gone. THE WAR IS OVER! (Thousands cheer).
This is a lot of great data and lines up with what Google Trends is showing. I am curious what actual traffic numbers Alexa shows for Superbowl week, considering the ungoldly amount of money the COS spent on that ad.
The Google trend numbers show an increase in interest, but it seems the ad couldn’t compete with news like Leah Remini leaving.
I am not surprised by any of these graphs.
100% of the press where scientology makes mainstream media is bad. The places, the people and their advertising creep folks out. Unlike clubbed seals, staff and SO, the rest of the universe is willing to research the topic on the internet with predictable results.
The actual success rate for strangers walking in off the street is probably close to zero. Who walks into any church, cold, and joins up? Really?
The only new people coming in these days are probably 2nd and 3rd gen, poor slobs victimized and sold into slavery by their parents.
Mike’s charts look good because of the flood of people walking out the door looking for information, solace or recovery.
It would be nice if the whole institution went away, the billions distributed to the social good and hubbard and everything he ever wrote consigned to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not franchise. That’s not likely to happen.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln
Yep, there are the figures right there. As Mike said, the only time the general public is interested in Scientology is when Tom Cruise is involved. Take the three biggest spikes in the Scientology graph. Mid-2005 was when Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch. Early 2008 was the attempted suppression of the Cruise video that led to the coming of Anonymous on the scene. And mid-2012 was Run Katie Run.
It’s a dramatic conclusion and an indictment of the Scientology Celebrity Strategy: the only so-called celebrity who can incite interest in Scientology is Cruise, and the general public thinks he’s a complete nutball.
Mike, those spikes will answer your question about what do they mean. Yes, searches, but specific searches. The two highest spikes, for example, coincide with Tom Cruise + Scientology massive footbullet media splashes. Early 2005, he was jumping on Oprah’s couch about a girl named Katie, scolding another girl named Brooke, and alienating a guy name Steve in the directors chair. The other late 2012 to early 2013 is Tom Cruise + Scientology again, this time being dumped by a woman named Katie and a girl named Suri. And some in betweens were the South Park Tom Cruise episode, Anonymous and the infamous Tom Cruise “I’m the only one who can help” looney video release to the fringes of the internetz.
It’s not what scientology thinks its means:D
Mike, I enjoyed your interview with Jeff so much. So many well-spoken, highly literate, highly articulate people have passed thru the cult. My favorite kind!
Hi Mike,
That is actually Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=scientology). I can’t attach a screen shot, but the big “Spike” in 2012 was for the month of July, which I believe was when Katie Holmes dumped the 3rd biggest being in Scientology.
The number for July 2012 says “61” & Google explains it as “Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for “pizza,” we’d consider this 100. This doesn’t convey absolute search volume. Learn more (https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4355164?hl=en&rd=1)”
You had a “69” for July, 2012 and “Marty Rathbun” had a “100”.
Being in the web development business, I track site traffic pretty regularly. Alexa.com has been noted on this site and appears to have relatively good info. Searching Scientology there, you will see that it is no longer in the top 100,000 sites in the world. It is ranked 108,359 – DOWN 29,451 over the last 3 months. AND, of that – 12% is from India, a country notorious for fake clicks.
For the last year or so, it has been ranked around 75-85,000 worldwide. A couple of years ago it was around 45,000.
Highest Ever (actually lowest ever as the goal is to be #1) was around 8900, a few weeks after the Tom Cruise psycho video was released years ago. It also spiked around 9,000 in July 2012 when Katie Holmes divorced him.
They got some decent traffic when Leah Remini bailed, but nothing like Cruise.
Overall, the traffic has been on a big downtrend.
Something quite comical/deceptive/criminal – when Katie bailed, they received approximately 1 million hits that week. The IAS sent out an email begging for dollars bragging how Scientology.org gets a million hits in a week. You gotta love that kind of ingenuity.
As for miscavige himself, I pointed out yesterday that he has about 5700 likes on Facebook. That figure has been in that range for quite a while. Compare that to Charles Manson with about 55,000.
The thing you have to love/HATE about miscavige: he will never admit anything. It is always the best year ever, better than anyone could possibly imagine. His hair could be on fire and he would keep spewing the bombast.
Yes, Dave’s really a piece of work.
The percent clicks from India is usually about 12% and does not seem to be trending up as Scientology trends down, as I might expect for an effort to stabilize traffic by buying clicks. On the other hand India has about 12% of the population in the world, and in spite of some parts being impoverished, compute usage overall is probably near world averages. I wish nothing but failure for Miscavige, but I haven’t yet seen a signal that the India clicks are purchased. I’ve made this point once or twice on Tony’s blog. If someone can show that the absolute number of clicks per day is usually some number plus or minus (absolute) that might look like a “buy”. But rationally, wouldn’t the percent purchased clicks go up as the total ranking declined in an attempt to stabilize it? Why would someone cheat for 12%, when a lot more cheating is needed to hold the line?
My 2 cents at least.
You may well be correct in your conclusion.
I think the oddity that hits everyone in the face is that Scientology has virtually no presence in India. Miscavige has tried to puff up a couple of Missions that opened there years ago (I think David Pomeranz “had” one of the Missions back when “celebrity missions” were somewhat popular — Memphis, SOMA, Santa Monica, Wichita — all closed these days except Wichita I guess).
If it were just curious people trying to find out about Scientology, why doesn’t India show up on the stats of Tony’s blog? Or mine? One would imagine it would be a corresponding percentage if it were simply based on the population of earth.
If you look up the stats that Johnny Tank posts on an almost daily basis at The Bunker, you’ll find that the Indian stats have gone from 12% to 4% and back again just in this year. That to me indicates click-farming, because if these figures were due to an increase of interest in India in CoS because of activity there or something, they wouldn’t be jumping about in a few months time from high to low(4.5% a@ one point, I believe) back to high again.
Poor ol’ COB, wants to be liked, but not liked and admired. A quick scan of FB tonight showed:
Dalai Lama
8,667,191 likes
Tom Cruise
7,009,864 likes
Snow White
6,804,055 likes
Pope Francis
668,245 likes
Enid Blyton
233,516 likes
Jedi Religion
225,922 likes
HM Queen Elizabeth II
217,123 likes
Charlie Chaplin
208,206 likes
Robert Mugabe
129,962 likes
Charles Manson
54,790 likes
Hare Krishna
29,637 likes
L.Ron Hubbard
9,493 likes
The Archbishop of Canterbury
6,750 likes
David Miscavige
5,772 likes
This just in from Dave: “I am generously offering everyone on the planet a $1.00 rebate after doing an extension course. Just press the like button on my Facebook page and pick up your dollar bill at your local org. You’re welcome.”
LOL!
Right on Sheldon,
I have done business in India (software and engineering) for years and it is a lot cheaper to employ people on their PCs…
I am sure the Church uses layer upon layer of well bribed lawyers and consultants to cover their tracks, but they cannot deny they have click farms in India. They do this to get more money off parishioners, so it’s more like click fraud. Shameful.
Let me know when there’s a click button that deletes Dave
And $1.5 B won’t keep you warm at night. Especially in a cell.
It is shocking the stat of interest for Scientology, yet it reflects a true fact that the blah, blah, blah at events, magazines and so on are just lies. On the other hand you have the millions collected by various Scn entities based on the IRS forms recently posted at Tony’s blog. That says it all, doesn’t it?
Re having interest on a sociopath such as Miscavige is no surprise decent people pay no attention to this character, he in fact doesn’t deserve it; why to search for what a criminal is doing? Bah, worthless.
Now, your blog’s stat is important as it reflects the number of people that have decided to depart the criminal organization the Church has become and gives the picture of its imminent collapse.
And an acknowledgment to you as this has been an important tool to communicate, see some facts and do something about it. So thank you Mike.
Mike, something has been done about it.
This looks to be from Google Trends. If you mouseover the graph it gives you the actual numbers during that time. Try it for lots of terms. You can even do comparisons. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mike%20rinder
Interesting — do you know what the numbers represent?
If you mouse over the data points, it will give you more information on each.
Here is the live Google Trends graph for Scientology News Headlines. Mouse over each data point to get more data.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=scientology&gprop=news&cmpt=q
Alanzo
From Google’s page explaining this: “The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don’t have enough data, 0 is shown.
“A downward trending line means that a search term’s popularity is decreasing. It doesn’t mean that the absolute, or total, number of searches for that term is decreasing.”
I took the last 12 months as a sample time frame with the location set to the US:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=scientology&geo=US&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=geo
This is a good example because one can compare interest during the Superbowl against ‘headlines’. For example, the ‘A’ is a headline related to Leah Remini leaving. The spike just before that was Superbowl week.
If you mouse over the other letters, you can see other ‘headlines’.
Per Google: “The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don’t have enough data, 0 is shown.”
So, I think they are only meaningful in comparison to other terms. For example: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=summer%2C%20winter&cmpt=q
Note the fun seasonality of these terms! Also, note how you can dig into any trend to see what countries/cities make up most of the searches.
Thanks Chinaski. A few others have also chimed in and quoted the same text from Google.
Being honest, I STILL don’t really understand this, but I presume I am not in error in noting the lessening interest in Scientology and virtually no interest in Miscavige?
Appreciate the time people are taking to comment on this.
Since these graphs are showing normalized relative volume of searches, besides looking at trends, they are also useful to compare relative volume of searches of different search terms.
Here is the comparison of “Scientology” and “Mike Rinder”.
http://www.ownimg.com/images/2014/04/21/Comparison-Scientology-And-Mike-Rinder.jpg
Mike, the y-axis on the graph(the up and down part) in Google Analytics represents the searches for a particular subject divided by the total number of searches at a given point in time(the x-axis). So the figure can go from 0% to 100%, 0% being the bottom of things, 100% being the top.
Wow indeed!