Quiz & Trivia in decline

The header for this article is a bit controversial for a site like this, I know. But I just did the numbers, and found that there could be a lot of different ways to measure the general interest in quizzes and trivia.

One way would be to analyze the traffic on major quiz sites. Only trouble is, that the term "Major quiz site" is subject to change over time, since websites come and go. Another trouble is: I don't have access to the data:-)

So I figured out another way around and had a look at the number of searches performed by users on major search engines over time. I made that analysis using Google Trends.

Google Trends for three quiz keywords

The graph shows the search trends for three specific search terms: "Quiz", "trivia" and "facebook quiz". I could have chosen other terms, but these three seems relevant and are more significant than other search phrases that I tried.

Each keyword has been derived from Google Trends in october 2010. The trends are relative and not measured in absolute numbers. There is a small note about "facebook quiz" because it still has a search volume far smaller than "trivia". I just included the trend to make point.

The first impression I had myself when I was looking at the chart, was "Oh, the number of searches for quiz is relatively constant if I draw a trend line". I don't know exactly what happened in those three weeks in 2007, but there is huge peak in the searches for the keyword "quiz". And there is not a corresponding peak in the news trend for the same keyword to explain it. The fact is, that if we look at the numbers from 2007 and forward, there is a substantial decline in the searches for "quiz". For the keyword "trivia" the graph is also downward-sloping, not dramatically, just steady.

Number of webpages in Google

Another way of measuring the popularity of online quiz and trivia is to look at how many webpages I can find in Google SERP on these subjects. I did that count two years ago, and recently I counted again. The result is quite remarkable as you can see in the graph below.

Of course we need to take into account, that it is solely Googles decission which pages they wish to include in their index, meaning just because Google doesn't show them, doesn't necessarily mean that the quiz and trivia pages doesn't excist. But my own experiences having searched the internet for high quality quiz and trivia sites are, that fewer sites excists and that many of those still excisting are old and needs development. This observation could support the theory of having fewer quiz related websites around.

The Facebook era

Facebook took off as a media around 2006 and has experienced exponential growth in number of users ever since (October, 2010).

Conclusion

My conclusions are that traditional online quizzes and trivia is beyond maturity and maybe on the way into its fall. Yet there will be new concepts to take over.