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“:
 |
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
- 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.
- Some outlets apparently run a strategy to further Wikipedia as their income source.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
