There was a spur of optimism to the news on Wednesday evening as the 33 miners in Chile who had been trapped for 69 days underground were finally rescued. The live broadcast of the event made the rescue all the more gripping to watch, and millions of people tuned in to see the heart-warming scenes of friends and families reunited.

According to The Guardian, 6.8 million people followed the mine rescue on the BBC’s 24-hour news channel, making it the third biggest day ever for the channel’s viewing figures. By comparison, Sky News attracted around 3.8 million.
Online people were searching for constant news updates as the event proceeded. A look at the search terms containing the word ‘chile’ shows that the BBC was also ahead of Sky News online, with ‘bbc chile miners’ being the 10th most popular Chile-related search term on Wednesday, whereas ‘sky news chile miners’ ranked 20th.

Of course, there were many searches for news relating to the Chile miners which didn’t include the word ‘chile’. Some Internet users simply typed ‘miner rescue’ or ’33 men stuck down mine’ and naturally there were some spelling mistakes such as ‘chilli miner’ and ‘chile minor’. Taking into account all of various search term variations surrounding the story, the most popular downstream website to receive traffic from the Chile miners portfolio over the last 12 weeks was the BBC, with 16.40% of all the clicks.

The BBC may have been criticised for blowing its budget on the Chile coverage, but the results seem to warrant the extra expense. As the BBC’s world news editor Jon Williams said, the public “valued the investment”.
In an interesting quirk, monitoring the most popular search terms containing the word ‘chile’ on Tuesday I was quite surprised to see Adidas pop up as one of the top search terms.

Although Adidas probably didn’t intend to capitalise on the event as a PR opportunity, searches for the company’s Chile trainers and clothing brands spiked in the same week that the miners were first trapped. The chart below shows weekly searches for the Adidas Chile brand. The highest spike in the last year came when the British & Irish Lions squad was announced in April 2010 as the Adidas Chile windbreaker was worn by the Lions players. However, there is another spike in the week of the Chile miner disaster.

Over the 12 week period that the miners were trapped, what seems odd is that Adidas did not feature prominently in the downstream websites to receive traffic for the Adidas Chile searches. Sports shops like JD Sports and shoe shops like Footlocker and Schuh all benefited from the spike in Adidas Chile searches, but Adidas’ own online store was ranked 13th overall for the branded searches.


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