Stephen Colbert Is Popular on the Internet

Stephen Colbert on Thursday was 

The third-place entry, just behind Letterman at 13 Arsenios, was a mild surprise: Dave Chappelle, whose show last aired on Comedy Central in 2006. Stewart and Jay Leno closely followed, at 12 Arsenios apiece.

In fairness to Hall, his Google search popularity has significantly increased since his show returned; since September, Colbert’s name has been searched for only about four times as often. But Colbert’s popularity could increase after Thursday’s announcement.

A very technical aside: Our measurement of Arsenios is derived from downloading week-by-week numbers from Google Trends and averaging them, which produces slightly more precise figures than looking at the aggregate numbers. However, there are a number of weeks when Hall’s search popularity was listed as zero by Google Trends. In fact, it was not exactly zero; some people were searching for him. Google Trends lists its numbers on a relative basis, where 100 is the peak week for the most popular search term. When another term is listed at zero, its search volume was very small by comparison, but it may have been anywhere between zero and 0.5, and rounded down to zero. In these weeks, we assume that the host’s search popularity was 0.25 (the midpoint of zero and 0.5) rather than zero exactly.