Franchising Inquiries Slide, Website Growth Slumps
There are many anecdotal stories of record numbers of out of work employees kicking the tires of different franchise brands in looking for a new career as a franchise owners. Other stories talk about record number of businesses looking at tapping into franchising to provide expansion funds during the credit crunch. But Google tells a different story.
Searches of the term “franchising” and “buy a franchise” have been trending down for years, with 2009 the lowest, according to Google Trends, a tool to see long-term trends in Google searches and news stories by topic.
That implies that fewer businesses are thinking about becoming franchise chains and that fewer of the growing ranks of the unemployed are even contemplating buying a franchise.
The points in the chart above are some of the top read news stories or blog entries of the year that readers pulled up when they searched the term on Google. Point A in 2004 correlates to a Malaysian news story, Big potential in local franchising, says consultant. And Point F in 2009 was Franchising: Good option to would-be entrepreneurs.
It's not just searches of franchises that are down. One would think that all those unemployed might be creating sites and writing more on the Internet. But Pingdom, a blog that tracks the uptime, performance and website trends on the Internet, shows that the rate of growth of websites slowed as well since 2007.
“This doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t getting any bigger. It just means that the yearly growth has slowed down, at least temporarily.
If you look at the growth during 2008, it turns out that not only was it significantly slower than it was in 2007, it was also slower than in 2006. You have to go back to 2005 to find a year with less growth than 2008” - Royal Pingdom
Netcraft comments that 2009 is showing strong growth primarily from a 46 million website increase as QZone in China supercharges social networking in the middle kingdom.
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