The birth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby girl, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt on May 27, 2006 not surprisingly spurred a flurry of internet searches for more information and photographs. People magazine reportedly paid $4 million last week for exclusive pictures of the baby, and the parents said that they will donate the money to charity. Last week saw a 200% rise in searches containing the word ‘shiloh,’ (week ending 6/10/06 versus week ending 6/3/06) as web surfers searched for pictures. Was it worth $4 million for those pictures?

Suri Cruise, the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes was born on April 18, 2006 and spurred a similar increase in searches. However, search term data shows that public interest in baby Suri was significantly smaller than interest in baby Shiloh: the share of searches containing the word ‘shiloh’ for the week ending 6/10/06 was 4 times greater than the share of searches containing the word ‘suri’ during its peak (week ending 4/22/06). The volume of searches for just the term ‘shiloh’ last week were 2.6 times greater than the word ‘suri’ alone during its peak. So there is some proof that it was worth paying a lot of money for the photos, certainly more than for photos of Suri Cruise.
Maybe the pictures were worth $4 million, but only if People sells magazines and drives site traffic. What can the data tell us? The weekly search data below shows that terms relating to the baby were responsible for 15 of the top 25 terms sending traffic to People.com. Very good. Also, Hitwise search term analysis shows that People was indeed the leading site receiving traffic from most of those terms. However, a look at the Hitwise gap analysis report for search terms to People.com versus search term suggestions for ‘shiloh’ shows that there were 705 terms containing ‘shiloh’ that People.com did not receive traffic on as of 6/10/06. Terms containing some form of the word ‘picture’ made up a large portion of those that People was missing traffic on. While People.com is now appearing in many of the Yahoo! results of the terms containing ‘pictures,’ it is not on the first page of many of the Google results. This is an important lesson in search engine optimization: optimize for what users are actually searching for. In this case, it’s ‘pictures,’ and if the word isn’t in page titles or meta tags, the search engines might not find you. Now, did People make the most of their $4 million?
A hearty thanks goes to Hitwise celebrity expert Sophie Lilley for her analysis of Shiloh vs. Suri and bringing up the $4 million issue.