I'm making a separate topic for this, based upon some comments I made this morning in the never-ending "is Venus Project different?" topic because I want to expand on something here. Sorry for the redundancy.
Thanks to Brenton's insistence that conspiracy and the claims of P.J. Merola (or whatever his name is) in "Zeitgeist I" play no significant role in the Zeitgeist Movement or Venus Project, I tried to quantify this today to determine whether my theory that the Zeitgeist Movement uses conspiracy theory as a recruiting tool has any quantifiable merit. Admittedly these results are unscientific, as anything on the web is, but here's what I found playing around with Google and various statistics.
Number of times Zeitgest I (the conspiracy movie) has been viewed: 100,000,000
(source: Zeitgeist's own numbers, at http://zeitgeistmovie.com/q&a.htm)
Number of times "Zeitgeist: Addendum," which was not focused on conspiracy theories, has been viewed: 10,000,000
(source: Zeitgeist's own numbers again: http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/wiki/index.php?title=Peter_Joseph#Zeitgeist:_Addendum)
Number of fewer views of the non-conspiracy Zeitgeist than the conspiracy one: 90,000,000.
Admittedly unscientific, and perhaps my math is wrong, but doesn't it seem like Zeitgeist's viewership dropped by 900% when they stopped talking about Jesus not existing, 9/11 being an inside job or Federal Reserve and banker conspiracies? Even with a fudge factor for the numbers themselves and other factors that may have turned off people to Addendum vs. the conspiracy Zeitgeist, it's still quite a significant shortfall.
I did a few Google searches too.
Number of hits for the word "Zeitgeist": 9,030,000
Number of hits for the word "Zeitgeist" together with "Movement": 1,420,000
The second number is crucial, because it tells us how many web pages are out there talking not about the movies, but about the movement. (Incidentally, the phrase "Venus project" only comes up with 233,000 hits).
Number of hits for "Zeitgeist" together with "conspiracy": 6,620,000.
Considering there are very few circumstances in which somebody who had never heard of Zeitgeist: The Movie would be searching for those two words together, this means that there are 5,200,000 more web pages out there discussing Zeitgeist conspiracy theories than there are discussing the Zeitgeist Movement! And it also means that 73.3%, or almost three quarters, of the people who made a web page containing the word "Zeitgeist" want to talk about conspiracies of one type or another.
What exactly are they discussing? Can't be sure, but here are a couple of others:
"Zeitgeist" + "9/11" (not a phrase together): 711,000 hits
"Zeitgeist" + "Jesus" (not a phrase together): 768,000 hits
"Zeitgeist" + the phrase "Federal Reserve"): 232,000 hits
I also did some searching on the Zeitgeist forums using the fairly primitive search feature.
Total posts mentioning "9/11": 2272
Total posts mentioning "Christianity": 1519
Total posts mentioning "conspiracy": 2787
Total posts mentioning all three words: 13.
Total posts mentioning the word "Movement": 27,318 (assume for the sake of argument that those discussing the movement are at least using that word in their posts, which I realize may not be totally accurate)
Total number of posts mentioning 9/11, Christianity, or conspiracy: 6,566 (2272 + 1519 + 2787 - 12 duplicates)
That's the equivalent of 24%, nearly a quarter, of the people discussing the movement. (May not be the same people, but interesting for comparison purposes)
Most interesting statistic, for my money:
Total posts mentioning "Venus": 1645
Yes, only 1645 people on the forums even mention the word "Venus" in their posts; assume the people who intend to talk about the Venus Project at least use that word. That's significantly less than the number of posts discussing "9/11" alone!
What can we conclude from this? Obviously you can't take these numbers to the bank, but here's what I see:
~ 90 million (900%) drop in viewership when you make a non-conspiracy Zeitgeist movie compared to a conspiracy one.
~ 73% of the web pages on Google mentioning the word "Zeitgeist" also contain the word "conspiracy."
~ The number of web pages containing the phrase "Venus Project" is barely more than the number of pages mentioning Zeitgeist's Federal Reserve theory ALONE.
~ Significant number, perhaps even a quarter, of the discussions on the Zeitgeist Movement forums--which you would presume would be largely composed of hard-core ZM people--are talking about conspiracies in some fashion, and that's LESS than the number of people talking about the Venus Project.
If anyone disagrees with me that these numbers show that conspiracy theories, if not THE single most powerful factor motivating interest in Zeitgest-related stuff certainly an extremely important factor, please explain your position.
Sorry for the long post.
