Old School or Blades of Glory? Time to determine which is the funnier movie… by looking at search statistics.

Published by Christian | Filed under Search Industry

Here at the Amplify World Headquarters, we’ve recently had ongoing conversations about which movie is funnier - Old School or Blades of Glory. So I thought hey, why not try to settle this question by looking at the search stats for both of the movies and seeing which one rules in the land of search.

I first took a gander at Google Trends. Unfortunately, Google Trends only can look at info from 2004 on… which excludes the year Old School was released. So this pretty much threw away any analysis I could look at for pre-movie buzz. I also wanted to just look at the search behavior from the United States. Here’s the resulting graph:

Obviously, Blades of Glory had a huge spike when the movie first was released to theaters. I’m also thinking the smaller spike afterward is from when the DVD was released. So, my conclusion after looking simply at this Google Trend graph is that Old School is definitely getting a more consistent search volume than Blades of Glory is (which I’m pretty much equating to searchers thinking Old School is funnier than Blades of Glory).

I then used Google AdWords’ Keyword tool to see which keyword phrase had:

a) more Advertiser Competition
b) higher share of November Search Volume
c) higher overall Average Search Volume

Here are the results:

Thoughts: it’s hard to really distinguish a true clear-cut winner here. On one hand, Old School at first look has more advertising competition, a higher volume of searches in November and overall search volume. But then again, the keyword phrase “Old School” could mean someone is looking for old school sneakers, music, hip hop, etc. So if we just look “old school movie” and compare it to “blades of glory” (to the best of my knowledge, “Blades of Glory” is an unique name to just the movie and it couldn’t mean anything else), then BoG has a slight edge in everything except for advertising competition. But then again, people are looking for “old school soundtrack” and even “old school 2″… and the other keyword phrases for Blades of Glory have “No data.” In this case, I would probably give a slight edge to Old School.

So it looks like from the two examples I’ve provided, Old School has won as being more searched on (and therefore funnier - I know, not very scientific…). What do you think? Which movie is funnier - Blades of Glory or Old School?