User:Stu/comScore data on Wikimedia/March 2009
March 2009 data
editcomScore 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
editcomScore 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
editcomScore 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
editcomScore'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
editcomScore 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 |
China, India trends
editcomScore 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
editcomScore 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
editWe 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
editI'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]](/wiki/File:At_sign.svg){kind=small}
wikimedia.org if you'd like a worksheet with the underlying data.
Participation estimates
editI 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 | |||