The Mainstream Media‘s never-ending golden shower coming from Wikipedia

Despite Trump, populism, a noticable left-leaning publicized narrative and millions of people around the world turning their backs on the Mainstream Media, most large news websites are still well and alive. If anything, they may lose in quality and reputation, but in the most cases the clicks from consumers are still coming in for them. One reason why this is the case is Wikipedia. Beyond Facebook and Google‘s tweaked seach engine, the globally very popular online encyclopedia is the by far biggest link aggregator for the web-based legacy media. In this article, I will show just how important Wikipedia is for them.

Clicks from Wikipedia as both relevant and significant source of income for the Mainstream Media

Usually, Facebook is cited as the by far most important source for traffic to media websites, may that be Mainstream, Alternative Media, or blogs. This surely is true and as statistics by the Nieman lab for 2017 show, depending on the specific topic links from Facebook are responsible for up to 90 percent of all traffic with an average of a bit less than 50 percent.

The second place in Niemans ranking goes to Google and its search engine, where about one third of all traffic originates from. This leaves about 25 percent which presumably consist to a large degree of direct visits and other sources.

Among these other sources, link aggregators like the DrudgeReport are playing an important role. While this is no surprise, there is another link aggregator that only few have on their radar: Wikipedia.

The free and open source online encyclopedia is one of the biggest link aggregators on the Internet and the site plays a hidden but crucial role in supplying Mainstream news websites of every size with traffic. In fact, the share of traffic coming from Wikipedia is so important for some of these websites, they might have to shutdown if the stream of traffic suddenly came to a halt.

In my article about the importance of the German edition of Wikipedia for the German Mainstream Media (German), where I put together the „Top Referring Sites“ from statistics available on Similarweb, the result was that some German news websites receive up to 25 percent of their non-Facebook traffic from Wikipedia.

My estimations for the equivalent of revenue they are earning from that traffic goes up to around 8,500 Euro per month, which is enough money to pay a full-time journalist. While only few outlets reach this revenue, for most it is still enough to occasionally hire a bunch of interns to „work“ Wikipedia and add new link-ridden content for the encyclopedia to sell their product.

In fact, some media outlets seem to deliberately run this as a business strategy. In several German Wikipedia articles for example I found direct links to Der Tagesspiegel, a mid-sized Berlin based news website, and I am not talking about links to their articles regarding the subject of the specific Wikipedia page, but to their homepage. The only thing missing was their logo embedded in the references.

Just as this strategy is basically a logic step for news websites and more or less straight forward, it also makes sense to conclude that this might not be limited to the German language version of Wikipedia, but extends to all of them.

Wikipedia traffic to English language news websites

I decided to take a closer look at the biggest English language news websites as I found them on Journalism.org and on Alexa.com. In total, I looked up the Similarweb numbers for nearly 50 English language news websites and in as it turns out in 33 cases, Wikipedia was in October in fact one of the five biggest traffic sources for them.

Here are eight sites of them which were among the top four in one of the two categories „total traffic“ and „share of traffic from Wikipedia“:

Link to an ODS/EXCELtable with all 47 outlets listed

Unfortunately, I haven‘t gathered the numbers for the month before, which is why I can only speculate whether the traffic from Wikipedia is stable. In case things look similar to what the German Mainstream Media is getting from there, the traffic is very solid and projectable. 

This means, there are in total about a dozen Mainstream Media news websites that can pay an entire journalist alone with revenue coming from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's effect on search engine results

Another side effect of Wikipedia being both an extremely popular website while having masses of links to the Mainstream Media is that for search engines, they are automatically among the top search results.

This turbo effect biases search results the same way as the "human bias" as Google is calling the effect. They may be trying to cancel out this bias on the level of technology as this Google video explains. But given the even greater left-leaning bias of search results this resulted in, you have to wonder whether both effects in terms of masses of Wikipedia links plus Googles attempts to unbias search results may not be self-reinforcing leading to even more biased results.

The bottom line is that thanks to the power of Wikipedia links, the Mainstream Media massively profits from two sides. Both of them lead to a situation in which consumers get less of what they want and more of what they don't want.

Looking at the results, there are several conclusions possible to make

1. For most outlets the revenue gained from Wikipedia as traffic source is very important which means, the entire Mainstream Media must be aware of it.
2. Some outlets apparently run a strategy to further Wikipedia as their income source.
3. The legacy media profits the most which can be explained partly by their huge archives from past decades that are now digitalized and accessible via browser.
4. Most of the outlets profitting the most are at least in their tendency left-leaning. It looks like Wikipedianistas don‘t see a site like the The New York Post as a credible source.

Given the fact that for most students as well as their teachers and many others Wikipedia is the prime source of choice to look for answers on the web, this really is concerning, as I believe.

What the numbers are showing us is basically that some media outlets are using a stealth tactic for advertisement to introduce a product to consumers without them realizing it, while in many cases recommending Wikipedia as source of basic information in their articles.

Most consumers trust this thumbs up for Wikipedia by the media and in return the fewest users of Wikipedia think of being in a shop when looking up the source for something they read there. They much more assume to be in an unbiased place where they can form an opinion based relevant aspects from all sides.

With this commerce driven left-leaning bias Wikipedia has, the site becomes less of an encyclopedia, but more of a leftwing multi-topic link aggregator. Its primary purpose of unbiased information gets completely lost.

If the service wasn‘t for free, you‘d have to call it consumer fraud.