It should come as no surprise that the majority of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google, followed far behind by Yahoo!. This might beg the question: where do these users go afterwards?
Heather Hopkins, VP Research at Hitwise UK, decided to take a look into this and found that what goes around comes around (for Google).
Two weeks ago, 51% of visits to Wikipedia came courtesy of Google and their generous placements of Wikipedia results, while 12% came from Yahoo!. After these visits, 9.81% of them went to Google, while 3.16% went to MySpace, and 2.44% went to IMDB. YouTube received 2.42% of these visits, while Yahoo! received 2.39%.
Hopkins also looked at the downstream traffic from Wikipedia in terms of Web site categories. The majority of them (about 35%) went to Computers and Internet sites, while nearly 20% went to Entertainment sites. Education, Shopping and Classifieds, News and Media, Lifestyle, Business and Finance, Music, Sports, and Government categories fell behind, in that order.
She also noted that some categories have clear and distinct authority leaders. For instance, Hopkins notes that the Entertainment category is led by IMDB and YouTube, while the Shopping and Classifieds category is led by Amazon and eBay. News and Media, however, lacks a clear cut leader. The New York Times received just 0.23% of post-Wikipedia traffic, while CNN received 0.20%, and BBC News received 0.18%.
These interesting figures spark some deeper questions about users’ habits related to Wikipedia, and some comments on Hopkins’ blog post point to some of them.
Whether there are any substantial habits or behaviors tucked away beneath these numbers remains to be seen.
Source:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2008/03/wikipedia_where_do_people_go_a_1.html
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