We’ve written several blog posts about finding the “tipping point” for bands and musical artists using Hitwise data (see here). Heather Hopkins our VP of Research first discovered this phenomenon here.
I wasn’t surprised when I read this article (subscription required) in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that suggested that a relatively new young-adult author, Stephanie Meyer, may offer readers an alternative to the now finished Harry Potter series. I wasn’t surprised because we’ve seen Stephanie Meyer’s site popularity increase substantially, rising to the #5 position (of 787 sites) in our Entertainment – Books category.
What was surprising is the tipping point chart that i created from visits to her site. Typically, when we create this chart for bands, we find that social networking traffic (net communities and chat) tend to be the greatest traffic drivers for a band’s early days, then a tipping point is reached as the band goes mainstream and individuals begin searching for more band information using search engines.
Here’s Stephanie Meyer’s chart:

Notice the tipping point is reversed, search traffic dominates after the release of Stephanie’s first novel Twilight (2005) and the tipping point is reached before the release of her second novel New Moon (2006).
So what explains this inverse pattern? Looking to the demographics and lifestlyle segments of visitors to Stephanie’s official site, we find that her biggest audience tends to be rural (versus the urban audience visited by the bands that we studied in our previous posts). The lesson: trend-setters and their behavioral patterns can vary depending upon the subject that you are studying.