Sunday, June 3, 2012

Top 5 Most-Viewed Teas on RateTea This Month

It's been a while since I posted a top 5 post. For past top 5 posts, I've focused a lot on webpages that have been most popular in an all-time sense. For this post, I'm focusing on the here-and-now, that is, the past month.


The following is a list of teas that have been viewed the most on RateTea over the past month:

  • Tazo's China Green Tips - I personally think this is a decent tea; it's a pure, single-origin green tea, from Zhejiang province, and in my opinion, Tazo stepped it up a notch when they changed to whole-leaf sachets a while back.
  • Lipton's Black Tea - This tea, nearly universally present in the U.S., doesn't surprise me on this list. It is also one of the most often-rated teas on RateTea.
  • Teavana's Monkey Picked Oolong - The only loose-leaf tea on this list, and among Teavana's most expensive teas. This tea doesn't surprise me on this list either; if you want to read more about this tea, I recently wrote a blog post comparing it to a green oolong from Life in Teacup.
  • Ten Ren's Ti Kuan Yin (Tea bags) - This tea has surprisingly high ratings, given that it's a simple tea bag. Having tried it, I agree that it is really not bad. I was a bit surprised to see this tea on this list, as Ten Ren is not the most well-known company.
  • Lipton's Green Tea - This one surprised me. I haven't reviewed it, so I can't say much about the tea.

For the curious, this ranking was very close. There are no major dominant players this month...pageviews tend to be distributed rather evenly over a large number of different teas on the site...all the top 10 were relatively close contenders with each other, with a few more pageviews easily re-ordering this ranking or bumping new teas onto the list. Runners up which were close to making this list included teas from Rishi, Upton, Numi, and Foojoy.

Don't like this list?

I don't like it either; I'd rather see more loose-leaf teas on this list, and I'd rather see teas that I think are more interesting or better quality getting more attention. This is true even among the brands represented here. For example, Lipton sells loose-leaf tea, and also sells higher-quality tea in pyramid sachets...these teas don't get much attention on the site. And of course, many of my favorite brands aren't well represented here.

I do my best to structure the site so as to favor companies selling specialty teas. But it's a basic fact that teas that get more reviews on the site get more views and attention, and it's also a basic fact that the mainstream teas are still getting the most attention. Want to change things? You can help by reviewing more teas on the site, or, if you're running a tea company, by letting your customers know about RateTea and encouraging them to review your teas, such as by linking your site to RateTea.

2 comments:

  1. Makes me wonder: is there a jump in statistics somewhere? For example the first 20 teas come close together while the next group has 50% less reviews? Is this the case?

    If it is the case it might be interesting to look at the top 5 of the second or third group. In other words what is the top five of non popular teas?

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    Replies
    1. No, not at all...there is no jump in statistics. The most-often-viewed teas all come close together and taper off gradually. There is no clear cutoff into different categories. There is a pattern that teas that have received more reviews tend to get viewed more, but it's a trend, not a clear cutoff, and there are exceptions even to this pattern.

      I think this reflects deliberate design, that I've designed the site so as to draw attention to teas of different types, from different regions, from different companies, and many people come to the site looking for something relatively specific, but people come to the site with a broad range of intentions.

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