Oil Spill Vs. Attention Span: Is this the month America stops caring?

Hey BP, you wasted $50 million on an ad campaign that made people angry and accomplished nothing. There's still one to three million gallons of oil filling up the Gulf every day, 1,800 recovered dead animals, 1,400 rescued oiled animals, and tarballs washing up on beaches from Galveston to Pensacola. Stop wasting your money on bad PR. Time will do the job for you.

From the end of May through June, it was an oil spill media frenzy ... and the public was following the the story more closely than anything else. But then the end of June showed up, General Stanly McChrystal teamed up with Rolling Stone to edge out oil spill coverage for the top slot in our collective consciousness. If we trust search insights (something BP thinks is important enough to buy and something that is being used to map the spread of diseases) oil spill will dip even lower over the next week. Google search trends for oil spill have taken a dive from their peak at the beginning of June.

That graph looks pretty similar for the terms "gulf oil spill," "oil spill 2010," and "bp oil spill."

There's been a similar decline in the #oilspill hashtag on twitter since the middle of June.

Interest is waning. Why? My guess is that the intense media coverage fueled a spike in search traffic to oil spill websites, including the official Deepwater Horizon Response page. That boom in coverage and the related search spike created a glut of similar stories (read: reporters on every channel walking along a beach, cut to underwater well footage), leading to a public sense that they know the story already. There's no need to tune in because there's nothing new. Unfortunately there's more the mainstream media could be covering than failed attempt after failed attempt at capping the well, but those stories are less likely to be reported and seen because the oil spill isn't the top story anymore (you can find a lot of those stories on Deep Sea News and the New England Aquarium's Rescue Blog).

This isn't really surprising. When it comes to major stories with long lasting implications, our search habits are pretty much boom and bust.

Searches for "Katrina" and "Haiti" spiked and disappeared, despite the ongoing recoveries. Searches for "Tsunami" did the same thing after the Southeast Asia Tsunami. Ditto for the "Virginia Tech" tragedy.


However, the oil spill is not a massive singular disaster like those examples. It's a prolonged nightmare scenario, more like the economic meltdown. Search insight for "the economy" shows a more nuanced rolling search rate.


Unfortunately, the longevity of a story does not necessarily mean steady search numbers. The "Iraq war" had a high initial spike followed by a quick decline in search levels. The spike is even more pronounced if the search is just "Iraq."



At the same time, interest in a long term story can be reignited by a compelling development in that story. Afghanistan searches had a massive spike around the time President Obama was making a decision about troop levels.

There are opportunities for the oil spill story to get a significant boost in interest. Perhaps one of the reasons the current coverage isn't pulling in the same amount of interest is that it's relying on speculation on the unknown. Once the flow of information about how the oil spill is affectingGulf ecosystems becomes clear, there will be new angles to draw in audiences. As always, the charismatic megafauna are in a strong position to make that connection, with everyone's favorite dolphins at the top of the list of baseline search popularity.


But unless something mind-blowing happens (a renegade pod of dolphins caps the leaking well), it seems unlikely that public interest ever return to the levels seen during the spike in early June. Search insight shows that interest is becoming more localized. These screen caps show the geographical source of "oil spill" searches over the last several months.

In March (left) you can see the country's "oil spill" search interest before the disaster. The Gulf states are searching furiously once the Deepwater Horizon explodes in April (right). Note that Alaska's search insight is likely because they had their own BP oil spill in April.

While May and June have strong national search numbers, you can see the numbers falling in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. At this point it's clear that "oil spill" searches will not reach the complete geographic domination that "Haiti" searches had after the earthquake (below).

The levels of human mortality and suffering in Haiti and along the Gulf coast are completely different. Unlike the earthquake, the oil spill has not had a centralized moment of consequence for the public to latch onto. Instead, it has been a long and exhausting slog through months of environmental carnage. This narrative has taken its toll on the public focus on oil spill issues, and a journalistic shift is necessary we want to maintain public interest in a way that will have an impact on future environmental policy decisions.