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Wikipedia - Where do People Go After Visiting Wikipedia?
October 11, 2006
Last night I was chatting with John Hornbaker of Parthenon Computing about flow after an Internet Peeps dinner. He believes that people will start paying more attention to flow to understand how people are moving around the web. We agreed that Wikipedia would be an interesting site to look at to begin to understand Wikipedia's flow. How do people reach Wikipedia and where do they go after?
First a paraphrased quote from Jeff Bezos: When library patrons use Amazon's catalogue to research what's in the library, they're creating flow through Amazon's site, and Bezos says he's all for that. Flow works both ways - it helps the library, but it also helps Amazon because someone might want to buy a used book that is out of print from Amazon.
Wikipedia received 54% of its traffic from Google (combined UK and .com properties) last week with an interesting mix of keywords sending visits to the website, including "sex", "richard hammond", "hurricane katrina", "lost series 3", "france", "high school musical", and "steve irwin".
The following figures show the downstream visits from Wikipedia. The first table shows the top 20 downstream sites last week and the bar chart shows the same report, but by industry, showing the share of UK visits going to the various Hitwise categories from Wikipedia.
In doing this analysis, the thing that really struck me was that there are clearly a handful of sites that are viewed as authorities in particular industries (such as Amazon, IMDB, and BBC News). Whilst visits are fragmented among hundreds of different websites in some categories (such as Lifestyle - Blogs, Entertainment - Television, and Travel) in other categories there is one clear authority.
The Computers and Internet category is the largest downstream category from Wikipedia, as it includes Search Engines and Net Communities and Chat. Search Engines is an example of a category where there is a clear authority - and that is Google.
Another good example of a category with a clear authority is Entertainment Movies. 3.24% of Wikipedia's visits last week went to a website in the Entertainment - Movies category and 2.02% of those went to The Internet Movie Database. The #2 recipient of visits in the category was Rotten Tomatoes, receiving only 0.12% of Wikipedia's visits.
Two categories with no single authority are Entertainment - Television and Travel. In both of these categories, downstream visits from Wikipedia are fragmented among hundreds of sites, each receiving a small share of downstream visits. Last week, 3.13% of downstream visits from Wikipedia went to websites in the Entertainment - Television category and this was shared among 264 websites. The #1 downstream site was TV.com, receiving 0.28% of visits. Channel 4, BBC - CBBC, BBC Weather and PBS Online each received 0.10% of visits.
Travel is also very fragmented with 3% of Wikipedia's UK visits going to websites in the Travel category last week, shared among 57 websites. Virtual Tourist and Time Out each received .03% of visits with the other 57 websites receiving .01% of visits each.
Flow seems to be working quite well for Amazon, being among the top recipients of visits from Wikipedia. Firms seeking to be recognised as an authority in a particular industry and seeking to benefit from the natural flow of visits online can learn a great deal from Amazon's (and IMDB) content and approach.
BTW - if you are interested in this idea of flow, you may also be interested in this earlier post on Google Book Search which looks at the share of visits it sends to book publishers.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 02:12 PM
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I have received a few interesting comments about this post by email and wanted to respond on the blog - to get the conversation going...
First - question about TripAdvisor. It was pointed out that TripAdvisor has a huge repository of content yet is not an authority site, based on downstream visits from Wikipedia. This is interesting. I think the reason is that Trip Advisor has great content on hotel properties, but not necessarily on cities. The travel info I looked at on Wikipedia linked out to maps and tourist boards and to sites with content about the destination, rather than about a hotel at the destination. However, that being said, Trip Advisor is starting to get more and more traffic from Wikipedia. Wikipedia accounted for 0.12% of TripAdvisor's upstream visits last week, a five fold increase over the same week in 2005 and a 45% increase in the past month.
The second question was about eBay. eBay UK is clearly an authority in Auctions and is definitely an authority site. It received .98% of downstream visits from Wikipedia last week and was the #8 downstream site. Wikipedia accounted for 0.11% of all UK visits to eBay UK last week, ranking as the #57 referer of visits to the site.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | October 11, 2006 06:21 AM