Is the Apple Watch hype media-driven or are consumers actually interested?

Less than a month has passed since the Apple Watch launch event, and we’re still almost a month from anyone actually being able to buy it. Still, it’s a brand new Apple product, so it must be a Web traffic goldmine, right?

We turned to data from SimilarWeb to assess who is benefiting from Apple Watch hype, and to see if the general public really are all that interested in Apple’s first major new product line since the iPad. How is the buzz faring on the Web, and can it last?

There are already sites that are getting good amounts of Apple Watch traffic, and you can see that not all of them are tech related – some mainstream news sites are benefiting, too.

Interest in the Apple Watch has been steadily on the climb throughout the year so far. Over the last 28 days it was the 49th most popular search term for driving traffic to tech news sites. That’s an increase in share of 25 percent compared to January 2015.

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That doesn’t tell the whole story though. Google Trends shows that searchers’ interest in the Apple Watch peaked the day after the March 9 launch event and has since settled down to a similar level as in the preceding weeks.

How does the Apple Watch affect Apple’s own Web traffic?

Meanwhile, over on Apple’s own website, the Watch page has risen to become the eights most popular page over the past 28 days.

Unsurprisingly, there was a spike in desktop visits to Apple.com on March 9, the day Apple held its event to present the device to the world in detail. On this day, the quantity of visits to the company’s website was up 45 percent compared to the two previous weeks’ average, and reached slightly more than 20.2 million visits.

Impressive? Well, a maybe little – but nothing compared to when Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last year. That drove a 310 percent increase in traffic to Apple’s site when compared to the previous two weeks, and led to 46.6 million total visits.

So, is it wrong to assume that the public must be salivating over the idea of the Apple Watch? Another data point is the device’s popularity on tech news site TechCrunch.

If we look at popular pages for the past 28 days (as of March 24), we can see that the audience is more concerned about ports missing from the new MacBook, or Apple’s move to kill the right-click. The highest-place Apple Watch article is in 14th place – the site’s liveblog of the launch event.

Of course, it’s still early days. Apple has yet to get into gear with a full advertising campaign for the Watch or get it into stores for prospective customers to play with. Maybe then buzz will start to pick up, but for now it seems excitement is lagging behind that for other tech news stories, and indeed, other Apple products.

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