Much has been made of the influence of male-focused content creators and their potential impact on masculine attitudes. The space is broad, including controversial figures like Andrew and Tristan Tate and charismatic nice guys like Gary Vaynerchuk. We reviewed a year of Google Trends data for 20 popular influencers who appeal primarily to men, and created an aggregate ranking of masculine influencer appeal across all 50 U.S. states and D.C. Ultimately we found Utah to be the state most enamored with these influencers, followed by Colorado, Nevada, California, and Idaho.
Below we've listed he top five states by Google Trends data for each of the 20 influencers used in this map. Of the influencers analyzed, Utah was in the top 5 states for search volume for 11 of them. Utah took the #1 spot for Google searches of Andrew Tate, Ed Mylett, and Jordan Peterson. One possible reason for Utah's top spot is a changing landscape of values, with large numbers of Mormon youth leaving the church and grappling with a crisis of meaning and self-identity. For young men, this could mean turning to online influencers for a sense of identity and direction.
Google Trends data was collected for each of the influencers listed above for all 50 U.S. states and D.C. from December 27, 2022 to January 27, 2023. Google's proprietary 100 point scoring system was used to represent each term's normalized search volume proportional to all other local searches. If a state did not have enough search volume to generate a score, it was given a default score one point lower than the lowest available number in the data set. Scores were tallied and ranked 1-51.