Wikipedia has been in the news a lot recently, and the ‘fifth column‘ in the Guardian had another story today, this time about political staff changing the entries for their bosses.

Two statistics in there really made me stop and think. I don’t know where they came from, or whether they are correct. If they are then I am just stunned. The statistics were:

1. 3% of all web pages visited are Wikipedia pages
2. Wikipedia is the 19th most popular site on the web

Here is why I find that hard to swallow.

Even if the differences in hits between website No 1 and website No 19 are so tiny as to be almost uncountable, that would mean 19 sites had 3% of internet traffic each which would mean that 57% of web page visits were down to just 19 sites.

Realistically I think some other sites must get quite a bit more traffic than Wikipedia. I don’t know which are the most visited but I’m willing to guess that Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay and the BBC all come high in the list.

Being very conservative and assuming that numbers 19 to 11 all get about 3% with numbers 10 to 6 getting a bit more at 4%, 5 and 4 getting 5% and the top three getting 6% that would mean that 19 sites account for 75% of all websites visited!

I suspect the differential is greater. I bet my mum has heard of Google, eBay and Yahoo but not Wikipedia. It would not be a great leap of the imagination to see 20 sites getting 80% or even 90% of all traffic if No. 19 is really getting 3%.

Maybe its true, and for all the thousands of sites out there, most people could get by with just a handful. Back in the early days (ie 10 years ago) nobody had really established such strong brand names. Maybe no site could account for even as much as 1% of all traffic. Could it be that as the amount of information and number of sources has grown, the majority of browsers are concentrating on fewer sites?

But putting it all in proportion, those 10% (possibly. Your mileage may vary) of page visits outside the top 20 probably add up to more than the total number of visits by everyone 10 years ago, such is the growth in Internet access.

One thing I do know – I could not get by on a mere 20 sites!

For example, I have been pretty busy at work and not using the computer at home very much this week, but even so I visited about 40 sites yesterday and I reckon only about 6 of them are top-twenty places.