Last week Apple and 02 announced that they had cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by £100 in the UK until June 1st. As always with Apple, the announcement generated a huge amount of media interest – including speculation that the launch of a 3G iPhone is now imminent. ‘iphone’ was the seventh fastest moving search term sending traffic to our News and Media category last week, and searches for the term reached their highest peak this year as a result.

So, aside from news sites and blogs, who benefited from this surge in interest? The chart below lists the top 3 websites receiving most traffic from searches for ‘iphone’ during the 4 weeks ending 19 April. As you would expect, these are the 3 authorised sellers of the mobile phone in the UK (Apple, O2, and Carphone Warehouse) - although their ranking has changed since the launch last year, with Apple’s iPhone site overtaking the O2 Shop to gain the top spot.

In order to analyse the specific impact of the price drop and resultant search traffic, we collected the data illustrated in the table below. All three sites experienced an increase in both their overall market share and the amount of traffic that they received from search engines last week, with Apple the big winner in both cases. However, despite the media interest, none of the sites saw an increased in traffic from our News and Media category. It seems that people read or hear about the news and then conduct a search which sends them to a retail site, rather than simply following links / adverts from a news page to a retailer.

Robin Goad

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

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