Just How Popular Is Wing Chun?
Most articles I’ve read that question which martial art is the most widely practised have answered that it’s Wing Chun. I’m not sure that this is the case though, and I don’t know where they get their statistics from. I know that if online resources are anything to go by then Wing Chun is one of the less popular martial arts. There is only a small provision for WC practitioners in the form of forums, blogs, general information on the internet etc. Invariably, if you do find a generic martial arts forum, there is very little on offer for Wing Chunners.
Just out of interest, I thought I’d do a bit of ‘keyword research’ in the area of martial arts, using some keyword tools. They give you counts of how many times a particular phrase has been searched for by the general public in Google. Here are my findings:
| Phrase | Searches |
|---|---|
| Kung Fu | 5,000,000 |
| Karate | 4,090,000 |
| MMA | 2,240,000 |
| Judo | 246,000 |
| Kickboxing | 201,000 |
| Wing Chun | 74,000 |
| Tae Kwon Do | 60,500 |
| Ninjutsu | 18,100 |
Although “Wing Chun” doesn’t attract as few searches as Tae Kwon Do and ninjutsu, I’m disappointed all the same. I thought Wing Chun would be more popular. What do we make of these statistics? Personally, I think that the number of times something is searched for in search engines is a good indication of that subject’s popularity. If you look at sex, for example, (hey, I have to do my research 
), we are talking 37 million searches for the same period! And that subject is pretty popular. So you can see that there is a rough correlation between the volume of searches for a topic and how popular it is.
Of course, some subjects just don’t lend themselves to being searched for on the internet, and I understand that. It could be that the martial arts is not something that people generally search for in Google. Perhaps they are busy outside actually doing it instead of reading information about it on websites. These statistics do, however, give us a useful comparison between different martial arts.
Wing Chun Popularity Predictor
I predict an increase in interest in Wing Chun. Why? The new Ip Man movie is sure to be a big motivator for people to find out more about the martial art that Donnie Yen showcases so well. Here’s a clip:
How can you watch that and not feel all fired up about Wing Chun? Whaddya mean it’s not real, it’s only a movie?! Check out more Ip Man fight scenes.
I’m grateful for what he and the film producers are doing for Wing Chun. Remind me to do similar keyword research one year from now to see what changes are evident in the rankings table.
