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User:Stu/comScore data on Wikimedia/March 2009

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March 2009 data

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comScore estimates that, during the month of March 2009, 327 million unique visitors (UVs) viewed our projects from a personal computer, which it estimates was a "reach" of 29.9% of the 1.09 billion worldwide PC-based web browser audience:

Worldwide unique visitors
Google Sites (includes YouTube) 831 million
Microsoft Sites 692 million
Yahoo! Sites 594 million
Wikimedia Foundation Sites 327 million
FACEBOOK.COM 295 million
AOL LLC 286 million
eBay 250 million
CBS Corporation (includes CNET) 203 million
Amazon Sites 195 million
Fox Interactive Media (includes Myspace) 183 million

Facebook moved into the #5 spot this month, passing AOL.

Geographic breakdown

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comScore estimates our audience in different regions, and also estimates what percentages of the audience within each region visited one of our sites:

Unique visitors Reach in region
Worldwide 327.1 million 29.9%
Europe 126.5 million 40.9%
Asia Pacific 78.0 million 17.8%
--India 7.0 million 21.0%
--China 2.8 million 1.4%
North America 66.9 million 36.0%
--United States 54.8 million 33.1%
Latin America 34.2 million 41.5%
Middle East - Africa 21.6 million 28.2%

Language breakdown

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comScore estimates visitors to the different language versions of Wikipedia and estimates the unique visitors worldwide:

Worldwide unique visitors
English Wikipedia 166.0 million
Spanish Wikipedia 30.6 million
Japanese Wikipedia 28.0 million
French Wikipedia 23.7 million
German Wikipedia 23.2 million
Portuguese Wikipedia 12.2 million
Italian Wikipedia 10.6 million
Russian Wikipedia 9.5 million
Arabic Wikipedia 8.4 million
Vietnamese Wikipedia 4.9 million
Chinese language wikipedias 4.7 million
Korean Wikipedia 2.5 million
Indian language wikipedias .3 million

This month Spanish surpassed Japanese to become the second most visited Wikipedia after English. Other notables changes included an increase in the Arabic Wikipedia from 6.8 million in February to 8.4 million in March.

Demographic breakdown

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comScore's panelists report age and sex so it can generate detailed demographic estimates, including raw data and also an index which measures the extent to which a set of visitors to our sites is over or under-represented compared to visitors to all sites on the internet. For March, comScore estimates our 327 million audience is made up of 181 million men (30.7% of men online) and 146 million women (29.1% of women online). We index slightly higher with men (102) than with women (97). Here's a breakdown of different age groups:

Worldwide unique visitors Reach in
age group
Index
Ages 15-24 87 million 29.7% 99
Ages 25-34 75 million 26.2% 88
Ages 35-44 68 million 29.0% 97
Ages 45-54 54 million 34.9% 117
Ages 55+ 42 million 34.7% 116

We index highest for older users (ages 45-54 and 55+) and lowest for those 25-34 years old. I dug into this issue, at first thinking it was driven by twenty-something preference for YouTube and Facebook. As far as I can tell, though, our comparatively weak performance in the 25-34 year old demographic is the result of our weakness in China where comScore believes there is a huge audience in that age range. For example, Tencent, Baidu and SINA all index above 120 for this demo while Facebook, Google overall, and Yahoo are in the 90s while both MySpace and YouTube are with us down in the 80s.

Project breakdown

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comScore estimates our audience by project:

Worldwide unique visitors
Wikipedia 324.7 million
Wiktionary 8.6 million
Wikimedia Commons 5.5 million
Wikibooks 3.8 million
Wikisource 2.9 million
Wikiquote 2.6 million
Wikinews .6 million
Wikiversity .5 million
Wikispecies .2 million
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comScore estimates the unique visitors to our sites from home and office users in China (excluding Taiwan and Hong Kong). In July of 2008, comScore estimated 232,000 UVs to our sites in China. In August, the month of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, comScore estimates we had 1.3 million visitors. By March, the audience estimate was 2.75 million, comprised of 1.8 million UVs to one of the Chinese language wikipedias and 0.8 million to the English Wikipedia. By contrast, comScore estimates the Baidu Encyclopedia had 39 million visitors from within China in March. Given that comScore does not track internet usage from public locations (e.g. internet cafes), these estimates certainly undercount overall activity from China.

In India, comScore estimates 7.0 million unique visitors came to our sites, or 21% of internet users in India. Of these, 6.9 million visited the English Wikipedia while just over 100,000 visited one of the different Indian language wikipedias.

Source of traffic

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comScore also provides analysis of the site a user surfs just prior to visiting us. The percentage of these "entries" from Google and other search engines is often used as an indicator of reliance on the search engines for traffic. Other major sites like YouTube, eBay or Facebook typically see entries from Google at 10% to 15% of their traffic while we are typically over 50%. Here's a breakdown of the top 4 for us:

Entries % of total entries
Google Sites (includes YouTube) 1,491 million 57.6%
Yahoo! Sites 147 million 5.7%
Microsoft Sites 106 million 4.1%
Logon 28 million 1.1%

Portal usage

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We worked with comScore to include estimates on usage of the Wikipedia portal at www.wikipedia.org. There's a wide range of usage across geographies:

Unique visitors to WP Unique visitors to portal % of UVs
using portal
Worldwide 324.7 million 15.2 million 4.7%
Europe 125.4 million 4.0 million 3.2%
Asia Pacific 77.6 million 4.1 million 5.2%
North America 66.4 million 5.0 million 7.4%
Latin America 34.0 million 1.2 million 3.5%
Middle East - Africa 21.3 million .9 million 4.4%

Trend data

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I've put together a PDF of comScore's estimates of monthly unique visitors to Wikimedia Foundation Sites since Sep 2007. Contact me at stu[at]wikimedia.org if you'd like a worksheet with the underlying data.

Participation estimates

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I wanted a sense of what percentage of our audience actively participates. comScore gives good data on unique visitors, and Erik Zachte and others compile counts of registered users who have made at least five edits in a month, which seems a reasonable threshold for active participation as it would eliminate some casual or accidental editors. With data coming from two different data sources it's a bit apples-and-oranges, but is still useful.

The table below shows the calculations for the biggest few Wikipedias. Due to the size of the English Wikipedia, editor compilations happen infrequently so the most recent data covers September of 2008. On the English Wikipedia only about .03% of the unique visitors actively edit. Put another way, that's less than one-third of one-tenth of one percent. If you include all users who made at least one edit, it's about triple that amount or just under .1%.

Sep '08 UVs from comScore Sep '08 editors with 5+ edits % of UVs
with 5+ edits
English Wikipedia 140,710,255 41,393 0.029%
Japanese Wikipedia 25,698,145 4,390 0.017%
Spanish Wikipedia 25,388,063 4,016 0.016%
German Wikipedia 20,435,314 7,144 0.035%
French Wikipedia 16,428,023 4,602 0.028%
Portugese Wikipedia 10,787,686 1,710 0.016%
Italian Wikipedia 8,637,544 3,208 0.037%
Russian Wikipedia 6,534,903 2,672 0.041%
Source: UV stats from comScore, editor stats for English Wikipedia from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_frequency, stats for other wikipedias from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm