Trend of the Day: Looking for Veep
In today's Trend of the Day we look at people looking for the show Veep
After Biden dropped out of the presidential race last Sunday, the internet was overrun by clips from the show Veep. That and other factors seem to have led a lot of people to watch the show. As USA Today reports:
The critically acclaimed hit, which starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer, ended its seven-season run in 2019. However, viewership of the first season was up 353% on Max on July 22, a day after Biden's bombshell announcement, with 2.2 million total minutes watched that day, according to Luminate’s Streaming Viewership data. That's compared to one day earlier, when "Veep" garnered 486,000 viewing minutes.
Can we see that increase in the search data? Sure, kind of. In particular we can look at navigational1 searches around the show. People who want to watch Veep often have to start by finding out where Veep is available. So we can look at a search like the following, for where veep over the past 30 days:
We can double check to see if viewing interest is driving that curve by mapping a few related terms in there. This allows us to keep our search terms loose to capture variations we might not be aware of, while making sure we are not looking at a trend driven be something else:2
Here we see that when we layer in veep watch and where watch veep we get a similar shape to the interest increase, indicating these concerns animate it.
Related queries include veep cast (“cast” being one of the most prominent queries of people while watching a show), max (the channel it is on), and people trying to find a free, non-Max place to watch it.
No great lesson here, but a simple example of how people use searches to move from something they see online (Veep clips) to action (watching Veep) — and how that leaves a digital trace.
You could see this as informational I suppose, but since people are looking specifically for a place to go to get Veep, navigational seems the correct category to me.
That little bump on the eleventh seems to be a phantom artifact — when yyou look at that data with more granularity there is no motion.