Since launching just one month ago, the Occupy Wall Street protests which stemmed from modest beginnings on the street corners of New York City have spread far and wide across the globe. Saturday was a day for global solidarity and protest as thousands in cities around the world came out to demonstrate and show their support for the movement. Though mainstream media was initially a bit slow to catch on, exposure eclipsed the national level as major news outlets move to provide world-wide coverage of the movement in more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa, Asia and the U.S.

To quantify the sudden surge of interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Chitika Insights analyzed query volume using a sample of their network traffic dating from the start of the movement to current day, which was made up of hundreds of millions of impressions. Given the low level of coverage the Occupy movements were receiving until late, we expected that there wouldn’t be a discernible level of activity up until recently – the results we found were surprising.

Occupy Wall Street

The level of overall interest in Occupy Wall Street took an upward turn just one week after the protests began, perhaps due to increased coverage by major news outlets as the story made its way into the main stream news. Query volume concerning Occupy Wall Street has grown by over 150% since the movement began just one month ago. More specifically, the sustained upward trend of interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement has been evident since the beginning of October, as major media outlets began to pick up the story.

In a large part, Occupy Wall Street owes much of its success to the advent of social networks, which have made it possible to communicate quickly, easily, and efficiently. By Monday the 17th, no less than 125 Occupy Wall Street Facebook pages were listed, and one in every 500 Twitter hash tags were related to the movement, as reported by the Tribune. We believe that the extent to which social media was used as a tool to promote Occupy Wall Street and other international protests this year has played a large role in their success and recognition.

Although there are not necessarily thousands of people coming out to support Occupy Wall Street in every city, there is certainly a movement taking place, driven by the growing trend in interest online as seen by our analysis. Given that there is no evidence of a dip or downward trend in interest concerning the movement, we believe that this means that Occupy Wall Street is continuing to stay top of mind for people around the world. Chitika Insights will continue to monitor this story to see if the trends remain strong or begin to reverse themselves as the focus of major media outlets begins to shift.

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