AMV, Machinima decline or rise of YouTube?

Google Trends is an interesting and, given the utter lack of context, somewhat dangerous tool. However, I can't help but analyse these quite graphs and think about what they could mean. Given the rising interest in User Generated Content from the press, industry and academia, I was somewhat surprised that searches for both of these topics have dipped in various degrees since 2005. The drop in searches for Anime Music Videos is quite drastic.

I do not have enough knowlwedge of the Machinima community to know whether this graph represents a realistic impression of buzz around the subject. For anime, I think it's true that there has been a decline since the massive rise between 2000 and 2005. The bubble had to burst at some point, and it is now shrinking to a more sustained level of interest. Likewise, it is apparent from data on animemusicvideos.org that there are fewer videos being submitted to that site. I don't see the popularity of anime, and by association anime music videos, corresponding with this graph directly. While anime interest has dropped I cannot imagine it has dropped to much below 2003 levels. Instead, I think a large amount of the searches simply went elsewhere and that these graphs show the rise of video sharing sites like YouTube and Stage6 rather than the sharp fall of anime music video popularity.

YouTube started in Q1 2006 and by Q3 it was very much apparent that if you wanted to search for a video, you'd start with YouTube. There was no need to use google to find anime music videos anymore. While some may argue that animemusicvideos.org also made google somewhat redundant and has since about 2004 the search facilities on 'the org' have never been as quick at finding something specific and the signup method of the site has always deterred the more casual of viewers, leaving google search as the easiest way to find a quick hit once Kazaa ceased to be.

Of course, we don't know the context. It's possible that a lot of the people searching for the term Machinima these days are more interested in what it is rather than finding examples, whereas Anime Music Videos is a self-explanatory term. The real way to judge the popularity will be if/when google provide use with similar data for YouTube. Until then, I'm definitely going to reserve judgement on these figures being a true representation of interest.