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It's just been two brilliant performances but Kings XI Punjab's Paul Valthaty is setting the online space abuzz. Google trends, which allows comparison of average worldwide search traffic volume in the form of an index, throws up some interesting figures.
Over the last 30 days, the ratio of traffic volume searched for Valthaty:Dhoni is 1:14. Sachin beats Valthaty by an even bigger margin of 21.5:1. Gandhian anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, who's also captured the interest of the media, beats the 27-year-old 12:1.
However, on April 13, when headlines screamed about the unsung hero Valthaty's kingly performance for Kings XI, search volume for the Mumbai lad playing for Punjab was considerably higher than Hazare's and Dhoni's, and a notch higher than even Sachin's.
Mr Nimish Adani, Founder and CEO of social media tracking analytics company, Salt Social Media, noted, “At 5 pm on Monday, we observed that there was a tweet every 10 seconds on Valthaty.
The spike overall, on online media (a lot of which is driven by social media) is quite pronounced on the match days.”
According to Salt Social Media's data, in the last two weeks (up to 5 pm, Monday), Anna Hazare registered 27.3 million mentions on the Web, against Paul Valthaty's 1.6 million mentions. In the last one week, Anna Hazare registered 11.1 million mentions on the Web compared to Paul Valthaty's 1.23 million.
In the 24 hours up to 5 pm Monday, Anna Hazare found 3.71 lakh mentions on the Web, while Valthaty's building up with1.29 lakh mentions.
On Facebook, while Anna Hazare has 1.3 lakh ‘likes', Paul Valthaty's ‘likes' stood at 5,600, but growing.
The volatility of cricketers and their brand value is well explained by spikes and buzz such as this, according to Mr Anirban Das Blah, MD, Kwan, an entertainment and marketing solutions company that handles, among other celebrities, cricketers Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.
“The buzz has no value to anyone except for media news value. There is too much volatility around cricket. There are many players who have been heroes for one year or so and vanished.
With Valthaty, he'll have to continue to excel through the IPL, and then make it to the Indian team and do well, for this buzz to translate into endorsements,” he said.
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