A new online index – much trailed on Splash – measuring how much attention the global shipping industry receives has gone live, offering maritime companies a way to assess public interest in shipping news and major incidents.
Created by crisis communications specialist Dustin Eno, the Maritime Attention Index combines Google searches, Wikipedia page views, social media activity and mainstream news coverage into a single daily score.
“I built the index to answer a simple question with a single number: how much attention is shipping getting right now?” Eno explained. “Media monitoring tells you how much is being published about shipping, not how much attention it gets.”
The publicly accessible platform allows users to examine historical attention spikes, compare incidents and identify how quickly public interest fades. Disasters such as the Ever Given, Wakashio and Dali casualties all show spikes. Eno’s analysis also reveals remarkably consistent patterns in how interest fades after major maritime incidents.
When adjusted for duration and intensity, the attention curve surrounding this year’s Iran conflict closely resembles those generated by the Ever Given grounding and Baltimore bridge collapse.
The index, which Eno has previously used in Splash commentary, is now available as an interactive public resource, accompanied by monthly analysis.
Today’s reading stands at 69.3, with a score of 50 deemed normal. By way of comparison, in the opening fortnight of the US attacks on Iran in March this year, the index shot up to 332.3 points. The index goes back to the start of the 2020s, with its all-time high being the Ever Given’s closure of the Suez Canal in 2021.
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Sam Chambers
Starting out with the Informa Group in 2000 in Hong Kong, Sam Chambers became editor of Maritime Asia magazine as well as East Asia Editor for the world’s oldest newspaper, Lloyd’s List. In 2005 he pursued a freelance career and wrote for a variety of titles including taking on the role of Asia Editor at Seatrade magazine and China correspondent for Supply Chain Asia. His work has also appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, The Sunday Times and The International Herald Tribune.
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