Here’s a little graph using Google Trends to compare how many people have been searching for the terms ‘celebrity’, ‘politician’ and ‘footballer’ in the past few years – more interestingly, along the bottom is how often those terms are mentioned in news articles. Even since 2004 the gap between ‘politician’ and ‘celebrity’ has noticeably widened – particularly since 2007 (narrowing this year, presumably due to the US candidate elections).

This isn’t news, just evidence for what we already know.

Dig further into the data and you get some curious insights, by the way. Country with most searches for ‘footballer’? Nigeria (followed by the more predictable UK and Ireland) City? Edinburgh. Most searches for ‘celebrity’? Philippines. ‘Politician’? Malaysia.