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Knol - Numbers to Lend Context to Google's Announcement
December 17, 2007
Last week's announcement that Google would launch Knol, dubbed by most as a Wikipedia competitor, has sparked controversy and even consternation among some. To provide context to the announcement (and a clear rationale for why Google would launch the service) I will share some stats on Wikipedia and other similar sites. (For a rundown of the project, see Danny Sullivan's post at Search Engine Land, "Google Knol: Google's Play to Aggregate Knowledge Pages" and to vote on whether this is a step too far for Google, see Duncan Riley's column at TechCrunch.)
Wikipedia ranked #15 among All Categories of websites in the week to 8th December 2007, based on market share of US Internet visits, and just over half (50.96%) of its traffic came from directly from Google.com. The following chart shows the weekly market share of US Internet visits going to Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Squidoo and Mahalo - the websites most often mentioned as competing with Knol. (I have not included Citizendium as it did not receive sufficient traffic last week for it to rank.)
Wikipedia has been around for a long time but visits to the site just keep climbing. In the week to 8th December, the site's share of US Internet visits was up 32% year on year. The following chart shows the monthly share of US Internet visits to Wikipedia over the past three years - from .038% of all US Internet visits in December 2004 to .46% in November 2007 - a 12 fold increase! Wikipedia broke into the top 50 sites based on share of US Internet visits in December 2005 and then broke into the top 20 in September 2006.
In the week to 8th December, Wikipedia was the #2 downstream website from Google (after Google Images), receiving 2.13% of the search giant's traffic. All of the competing products I mentioned earlier receive most of their traffic from search engines. For example, Squidoo received 71.20% of its traffic from search.
To give you an idea of what information people are accessing on these services, the following table lists the top 10 search terms based on share of visits to Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers and Squidoo in the four weeks to 8th December 2007, excluding navigational search terms (such as "wikipedia" and "wikipedia.org").
Whatever Google's stated rationale for launching Knol, Wikipedia gets a pile of traffic from Google and the idea of hosting ads next to that traffic is no doubt appealing.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:10 AM
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- Google Knol: Competitors Respond & Time To Limit The Aggregators? (Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing)
Last week, our Google Knol - Google's Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages article covered the Wikipedia-like Google Knol product that Google is testing and may release in a few months. In that article, I noted how Knol was aimed squarely at services like... [Read More] - Google Knol: Competitors Respond & Time To Limit The Aggregators? (Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing)
Last week, our Google Knol - Google's Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages article covered the Wikipedia-like Google Knol product that Google is testing and may release in a few months. In that article, I noted how Knol was aimed squarely at services like... [Read More]
Comments
Hi Arjo - nice to hear from you.
Wikipedia received 50.96% of its own (upstream) traffic from Google and it was the #2 downstream site from Google, receiving just over 2% (2.13%) of the search giant's traffic.
Definitely tempting!
Best, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | December 19, 2007 09:16 AM
Considering the pennies(literally) that contributors make off articles at suite101.com and helium.com, there will be minimal incentive for any writers to abandon Wikipedia, which continues to maintain a respectable standard of quality in a non-profit environment.
I predict that good contributors will remain with Wikipedia, and Google Knol will become saturated with mediocre content. Top Wikipedia contributors would then intentionally avoid Knol in order to guard their integrity.
The only competitive advantage that Knol has is Google itself, which has much to do with monetization and competition. Wikipedia has no such constraints, which allows the greatest open-source encyclopedia the world will ever see to focus on information in its unadulterated form.
Posted by Les Penee | December 23, 2007 06:32 PM
I don't think wikipedia has attracted many potential writers to their platform. I work in a top academic institute and except me no other faculty member writes for online platforms. There are a large number of potential persons with knowledge and commitment for quality out there. Google knol will not be short of quality writers. No doubt google may come out with quality improvement tools at a later point in time.
Posted by Narayana Rao KVSS | July 30, 2008 12:26 PM
When viewed from a natural search perspective Heather you can understand the temptation for Google to try and monetise its real estate by owning as many properties and positions that will rank 'naturally' as opposed to paid search advertising.
Wikipedia has been the biggest beneficiary of Google's link-based search algorithm - whilst it may be a temptation too big for Google to ignore I also feel that it's a further piece of the search pie owned by the search engine - the results already contain video's from youtube and news and images from many sites that carry Adwords.
There are a long list of failed search engines that have crossed this line before...
Do you know what the percentage of Google traffic Wikipedia enjoys now?
Posted by Arjo Ghosh | December 18, 2007 11:07 AM