I was recently poking around on Google Trends and Alexa and ran a few searches that provided surprising results.
The buzz on the blogosphere (and elsewhere) is that we are in a ‘bubble.’ VC’s investing like crazy, people spending money they don’t have, etc’
Well people say “numbers don’t lie,” so I decided to investigate…
If it were a true bubble I would expect that the term ‘web 2.0’ would be getting more and more airtime as the ‘dumb masses’ begin to learn what it means and write about it. Unfortunately Web 2.0 is in a major correction pattern (see major dip in 2007):
Next, if it’s true that everyone is starting a company and every MBA wants to be a VC wouldn’t you expect that the number of people searching for and writing about the term ‘venture capital’ would be through the roof? Well, actually the opposite is true:
Finally if we were in a bubble, people flush with excess cash and higher risk tolerance would be all be investing in the market, right? And if the internet generation were investing, wouldn’t it make sense that they would be using an online brokerage like Etrade? Thus Etrade must be getting traffic like crazy, right? Well, no:
So what does all this mean? I don’t know.
But, maybe this whole ‘bubble thing’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What do you think?