Leuksman.com published some revealing statistics on Wikimedia traffic.
Now, the numbers are extrapolated – meaning they work on a smaller sample, and then increase the returned value in proportion of the sample size – and as they cover all Wikimedia properties, this includes not just Wikipedia but also Wikiquote, Wiktionary and more (also, the sample size works on a 3-day basis only, which can skew the numbers due to weekend traffic; i.e. if it was Sunday – Monday, the numbers may be lower than reality, and if it’s Monday – Wednesday, they may be higher). But this is still telling for Wikipedia, arguably the most well-known member of the Wikimedia family.
Caveats aside, here’s the gist, with rounded numbers: Wikimedia’s monthly traffic is 7 billion page views per month. Google is responsible for an astounding 24% of all this traffic. Put differently, Wikipedia/ Wikimedia results in Google searches are clicked on roughly 56 million times a day. (Yahoo in comparison only sends 2%; Ask.com ends up at a meager 0.05%.) Pages from Wikipedia are heavily cross-linked, and internal links from Wikimedia properties make up 44% of the traffic, according to the numbers.
Leuksman.com adds, “We should be able to process similar statistics on an automated basis from the log server now that we’ve got it set up, including breakdowns by site and by language.” With more detailed statistics, especially those that single out Wikipedia.org, we might be able to do some interesting thought experiments – like how much Wikipedia could earn per day if they’d have AdSense ads on their pages.
[Thanks Mathias Schindler!]
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