Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-05-23/Traffic growth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Traffic growth in US second only to baseball

By Michael Snow, 23 May 2005

Additional data on Wikipedia's growing traffic was reported last week, as it showed the second-largest percentage gain among all internet sites for the month of April.

In a report from comScore Media Metrix, the Wikipedia sites showed a 40.9% growth in the number of unique visitors from March to April (5,413,000 to 7,626,000). In percentage terms, this placed behind only Major League Baseball's site at mlb.com, whose traffic increase can be explained by the opening of the baseball season.

The comScore data focuses only on internet activity for the United States. Based on comScore's figure of 164 million internet users, this means that 4.65% of all people in the US who used the internet in April visited Wikipedia (or 2.58% of the total US population, using the latest estimates).

Top 100 in US and worldwide

With its information limited to US traffic, comScore shows Wikipedia coming in exactly at #100 when ranked according to the number of unique visitors. However, rankings that take worldwide internet traffic into account show Wikipedia placing higher, suggesting that its appeal is even greater outside the US.

According to Alexa traffic rankings, Wikipedia is now solidly in the top 100 internet sites, with its traffic over a three-month period standing at 88th. Furthermore, a number of the sites ranked by Alexa are not focused on the US and do not figure in the comScore report. Among English-language sites, Alexa now ranks Wikipedia in the top 50 at 48th.

Also this week: Editor's note — Image policy — German scandal — Radio show — BC/BCE/CE/AD — Wikitech — Librarians — Press coverage — Traffic — T.R.O.L.L. — Wikijunior