We did the math. And triple-checked it because the stats seems completely unrealistic. But it stands – Australian-based cannabis news and articles per year has grown 18,850% since 2010.
The data was sourced using AHREFs – one of the world’s most authoritative and widely used Google search tools. As of writing, their system has 425.47 billion pages in their database, tracking 501.38 million keywords, all whilst discovering 40 million new pages every day. Numbers truly hard to conceive.
For this study, we used their tool called “Content Explorer”. This allows you to ‘Search for any word or phrase and get relevant pages with useful SEO and social metrics.‘
We used a single phrase to collect the data: “inurl:cannabis inurl:.com.au“.
The first part – inurl:cannabis – represents that the word “cannabis” must be in the url. For example, https://www.ponderingpot.com.au/cbd-oil/ would not return as a result. But, https://www.ponderingpot.com.au/cannabis-cbd-oil/ will return as a result. This ensures the main focus of the article is cannabis.
The second part – inurl:.com.au – represents that the website which the article was published on, is Australian based. Although this query may return Australian-based media reporting on international cannabis stories, the readers of these websites are mostly Australian, hence the article likely has some relevance to Australia.
Results
Here are the results of the study:
And the raw data:
| Year | News |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 10 |
| 2011 | 32 |
| 2012 | 42 |
| 2013 | 50 |
| 2014 | 172 |
| 2015 | 271 |
| 2016 | 492 |
| 2017 | 970 |
| 2018 | 1031 |
| 2019 | 1493 |
| 2020 | 1895* |
Conclusion
The results may seem like a bit of a no-brainer, especially with Australia legalising medical cannabis in 2016 and the ACT becoming the first state to legalise recreational cannabis early in 2020 (although you still cannot buy it – only grow). But we thought it’d be interesting to see how just much the Australian media is talking about cannabis.
Given the results – it’s a lot. Much more than we expected, and with the impending cannabis referendum in New Zealand, and potential recreational legalisation in Australia over the next few years, it’s likely these numbers are only going to continue to increase.
For now, the team here at Pondering Pot, including myself, is greatly happy to see more and more Australian outlets discussing cannabis, with many covering the abundant number of success stories Australians have about medical cannabis.
*As 2020 is yet to finish, we extrapolated the data for the year so far (1303 @ 8 Sep) for the full year.
