Wikipedia shows long tail & search power

Taking a look at the 2009 list some remarkable pages appear in the top. It is clear that Michael Jackson gained a lot of traffic since his death, but The Beatles still seem more popular than anything. They collected over 111.000 hits.

A remarkable one is located on the fourth spot. No less than 78.000 users visited the favicon.ico from Wikipedia. Note: this is not a page about the phenomenon favicon, but the actual Wikipedia favicon.

Movies, games and current events also are popular on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia gets a lot of traffic on subjects like Slumdog Millionaire, Transformers and Scrubs.

As with other lists, like those on Google Trends, the newest webservices also account for a lot. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia itself are in the top 20.

Finally Wikipedia is actually really used as an encyclopedia since we can see a lot of historical orientated pages being visited with "World War II" on number 12 as the highest ranked historical page followed by Hitler on the 17th spot.

The list is interesting for many reasons. As mentioned before it does show us trends and it does give us an opportunity to step into the possibilities of Wikipedia. Also it shows the power of search. Every single page in the top 15 of this list ranks in the top 3 in Google when searching for the specific term. Sadly the list doesn't tell us what percentage of traffic is coming from Google...

The complete top 50:

1. Wiki (131,383 page hits per day)
2. The Beatles (111,896)
3. Michael Jackson (79,734)
4. Favicon.ico (78,077)
5. YouTube (72,318)
6. Wikipedia (52,542)
7. Barack Obama (49,401)
8. Deaths in 2009 (48,758)
9. United States (46,545)
10. Facebook (42,679)
11. Current events portal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events] (40,962)
12. World War II (29,736)
13. Twitter (28,511)
14. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (28,395)
15. Slumdog Millionaire (26,755)
16. Lil Wayne (26,210)
17. Adolf Hitler (25,481)
18. India (25,380)
19. Transformers 2 (24,842)
20. Scrubs (TV series) (24,758)
21. Sex (24,754)
22. Rhianna (24,670)
23. United Kingdom (24,300)
24. Abrham Lincoln (23,743)
25. Heroes (TV series) (23,569)
26. Watchmen (film) (23,544)
27. Lady GaGa (23,376)
28. Star Trek (film) (22,990)
29. 2009 Swine Flu outbreak (22,968)
    
30. Featured content portal (22,829)
    
31. Megan Fox (22,573)
    
32. Naruto (22,573)
    
33. Australia (22,544)
    
34. Canada (22,437)
    
35. World War I (22,307)
    
36. Vagina (22,295)
    
37. List of House episodes (21,950)
    
38. Japan (21,797)
    
39. Martin Luther King Jr (21,786)
    
40. Miley Cyrus (21,724)
    
41. Robert Pattinson (21,515)
    
42. Deadpool (comics) (21,264)
    
43. Twilight (2008 film) (21,158)
    
44. Windows 7 (21,018)
    
45. House (TV series) (20,882)
    
46. Terminator Salvation (20,743)
    
47. Kristen Stewart (20,538)
    
48. Internet Movie Database (20,422)
    
49. 2012 (20,347)
    
50. X-Men Origins: Wolverine