“Camden Town is burning down” claimed Amy Winehouse during her Grammy acceptance speech and, unfortunately, parts of it actually were. The fire that ravaged through Camden Market at the weekend received a lot of coverage in the press, and as a result searches for ‘camden’ increased by 250% last week. The top two destinations for searchers were the Camden Lock Market homepage and the Camden local government page, both of which experienced a significant spike in traffic on Sunday.

It’s interesting to look at who was going to these sites. The Camden Lock Market homepage saw the biggest increase of the two, with 30% of its traffic last week coming from the BBC News site. Nearly two thirds of visitors to the site came from outside London, nicely illustrating the national interest in the story. On the other hand, 78% of visitors to Camden council’s website were from the capital – with many concerned local residents and businesses presumably amongst the new visitors.

Local resident Winehouse had a better night than her adopted hometown of course, winning 5 Grammys despite not attending the ceremony in the Los Angeles. As you can see from the chart below, there was a notable increase in traffic to her homepage following the victories.

However, it seems like the awards will benefit Amy Winehouse’s career more in the US than the UK. The singer is hardly lacking exposure at home, and the press coverage generated by her well documented troubles undoubtedly played a role in her album ‘Back to Black’ being the biggest selling album the UK last year. Therefore, it’s interesting to compare the traffic trends in the UK chart (above) with the American chart (below). UK traffic to her homepage spiked on Monday, but that peak was smaller than the one on 22 January caused by the Sun hosting a video of the singer allegedly taking illegal drugs. That event also caused a spike in US traffic, but this was significantly less than the spike that resulted from her Grammy victories this weekend.

What this data seems to illustrate is that, while there may be no such thing as bad publicity, the value of good and bad publicity varies based on a number of factors. In the case of Winehouse these variables include the audience (Americans vs. Brits), the product (both her album and her image), and the stage of the marketing cycle (her career is more established in the UK than the US).

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

Image By mikeakelly