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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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« When is Cyber Monday? | Snow and ice cause weather website traffic to triple »

Wikileaks revealed as 13th biggest search term online

December 01, 2010

Apart from the weather in the UK, the major story capturing headlines over the last few days has been the sensational reveals from Wikileaks.

Major caches of US intelligence from the embassy cables were leaked from the website, creating a furore of media attention. Visits to the Wikileaks website tripled on Monday as the first leaks were posted online.

Wikileaks internet visits Nov 2010.png

On 29 November, ‘wikileaks’ was the 13th most popular search term typed into all search engines, although UK Internet users were also clearly worried about the snow, with ‘bbc weather’, ‘met office’ and ‘weather’ all appearing higher than ‘wikileaks’.

Wikileaks search terms Nov 2010.png

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the websites that benefited from traffic on Monday for the search term ‘wikileaks’ were news content sites. The top news sites to receive traffic from ‘wikileaks’ were The Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mail.

Wikileaks visits to top news sources.png

Compared to Monday 22 November, visits to the Telegraph website increased by 7.13% whilst visits to the Daily Mail actually decreased by 5.48% on 29 November. The Guardian, which had secured a number of exclusive deals with Wikileaks saw an 17.83% uplift in traffic between the two Mondays.
On 29 November, ‘wikileaks’ was the third biggest search term driving traffic to The Guardian website after ‘guardian’ and ‘the guardian’ – showing the importance of the search term to the performance of the website that day.

Wikileaks Guardian search terms.png

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Posted by Robin Goad at 10:17 AM | (0)
In Categories Government | News and Media

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Robin Goad

Research Director, Hitwise UK.

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