Cologne. In Germany on the 22nd March, new social distancing regulations were released. These are like those of other ‘locked down’ European countries, but a little softer than some other markets. The overall situation in Germany is, at this stage, less critical than in other countries too.
It may be that German people approach the situation with seriousness and a sense of calm. We are able to track this on a daily basis, as we measure the well-being score of every new member of our panel.1. If we focus on the answers collected in Germany around the lockdown period including before & after, we can clearly see no major shifts in feeling.
We also analysed our passive metering data, which monitors those that have opted in to have their web navigation tracked across device2
We do notice some changes in their online behavior.
** measured on mobile and desktop / * measured on mobile / No* measure on desktop
Legend: Red = Decrease / Blue = Increase
** measured on mobile and desktop / * measured on mobile / No* measure on desktop
When we look into the data, at a domain level, this data confirms the initial intuition we witnessed in the “happiness” survey mentioned at the start of our paper.
German’s online behavior reflects a lot of interest in the situation as people look for information:
- +179% on John Hopkins university website; a website which visualized data about the outbreak)
- +180 % on morgenpost.de,
- + 83% on kn-online.de
We observe the same phenomena on länder official websites:
- +178% on baden-wuerttemberg.de
- +80 % on Bayern.de.
The data also reflects that people need to stay connected and organize themselves in order to work from home:
- +314% on zoom.us
- +112% on SoundCloud
But the biggest changes, as shown on the graph above, come from entertaining websites (desktop measures):
- +1338% on Disney plus (the service has just been launched)
- +18% on Netflix
- +5% on YouTube
We see the same trend emerge on gaming websites:
- +35% on gamepedia.com
- +32% on diesiedleronline.de.
German people are absolutely taking this situation seriously, they comply to the new regulations (usages of waze and google maps has decreased by more than 2 for instance) but we have to admit that some indicators let us think that a breath of serenity comes from Germany! Pretty refreshing during these times!
- Sample size = 2571 for March
- Measures based on 1,286,946 websites visits on desktop and mobile, from a n=2,560 national representative (gender, age) German sample, timeframe: 1st of March to 30th of March
Measures are based on the comparison between and after the announcement of the new regulations on the 22nd of March
