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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK
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Wikipedia Blackout sends info junkies to mobile website
January 19, 2012
On Wednesday 18 January visitors to Wikipedia in search of answers were greeted with darkness.
In protest against the two congressional proposals in the States which are intended to halt online piracy, Wikipedia and other sites including Reddit went dark claiming the bills will infringe on freedom of speech. With people unable to easily access Wikipedia through their laptop or PC, info junkies turned to their mobile devices where access to the Wikipedia Mobile site was unhindered. 1 in every 7 visits to Wikipedia came from a smartphone or tablet yesterday, a 14% increase in mobile visits from the previous day.
In total there were 5.8 million visits to Wikipedia on 18 January and an additional million visits to the mobile website. Despite expectations that visits would decrease as a result of the blackout, visits to the main Wikipedia site actually increased by 4.1% compared to 17 January, although they didn’t reach the heights of 2 January when the new episode of Sherlock aired on iPlayer. Among the top search terms driving traffic to Wikipedia on that day were ‘irene adler’, ‘lara pulver’, ‘sherlock’ and ‘benedict cumberbatch’.
One of the negative effects of the blackout is that average visit time to Wikipedia halved from 8 minutes to 4 minutes on 18 January as people went to other websites to retrieve the information they sought. So where did people go without Wikipedia if they didn’t have a mobile device? Using the downstream data n Hitwise we can see those websites which saw the greatest increase in traffic after a visit to Wikipedia between 17 and 18 January.
As the only part of the site to be affected by the blackout was the English verison multi-lingual Internet users went to the French and Spanish versions. News sites including BBC News, Fox, Daily Mail and CNN also increased their downstream clicks from Wikipedia, but the biggest growth was for IMDB. Historically, entertainment has always been one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Wikipedia (as witnessed in the Sherlock example above) so it is not that surprising that without Wikipedia traffic increased to IMDB – one of the biggest online authorities on movies and TV. IMDB saw a 12% increase in visits yesterday with 3.4% of all visits leaving Wikipedia going straight to the website.
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Posted by James Murray at 12:03 PM
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