A year stuck in traffic

Well, "Traffic report" has reached the end of its first year. I want to say a big thank you to all those who offered positive feedback and gave me the will to keep going on what is, I'll be honest, a fairly tedious task, and to those who still feel that the traffic report could be improved, I'm always open to constructive criticism and am still hoping to strike the right balance.

To close out 2013, here is the first annual traffic report, showing the 25 articles which gained the most traffic over the entire year. Rather than annotating individual topics, I thought it would be best to strip the list down to the bare essentials and then discuss any overall trends that emerge. Broad themes are color-coded in the key below. For the top 25 topics for this week, see WP:TOP25.

Rank	Article	Class	Views
1	Facebook		30,437,829
2	Deaths in 2013	List	21,032,962
3	Breaking Bad		17,184,556
4	Google		16,930,496
5	World War II		16,632,652
6	Youtube		15,863,520
7	List of Bollywood films of 2013	List	15,734,806
8	United States		15 324 117
9	The Walking Dead (TV series)		14,506,197
10	Game of Thrones		14 222 748
11	Yahoo!		13,473,783
12	Nelson Mandela		13,239,155
13	The Big Bang Theory		12,843,248
14	Arrow (TV series)		12,285,242
15	Wikipedia		12,119,569
16	India		11,799,639
17	How I Met Your Mother		11,744,355
18	Jennifer Lawrence		11,335,347
19	Sex		11,180,431
20	Eminem		11,113,512
21	IPv6		10,547,448
22	Macklemore		10,376,268
23	Abraham Lincoln		10,103,779
24	Doctor Who		10,031,624
25	2013 in film	List	9,945,953

Key
Website
People
TV show
Film
Country
Other topic

The first thing that should leap out is that this list is not a random hodge-podge of disparate topics. In fact, the majority are relatively evenly split between three themes: people of interest, television, and websites. The second obvious trend is that the quality of the articles on this list is noticeably higher than for those in the weekly roundup—articles with a sustained level of high traffic are more likely to attract dedicated editors.

Determining the popularity of website articles is somewhat problematic, as it is currently impossible to say with certainty whether such views are the result of honest interest, or users accidentally clicking the Wikipedia page on Google's search list instead of the website itself. Given that the articles' respective popularities are largely inline with their sites' Alexa rankings, the latter hypothesis does seem credible. Access to more detailed search information, such as bounce rate, might help resolve the issue.

As for one of the other overarching topics—television—it seems that, with access to all of human knowledge at their fingertips, what English-speakers truly wish to know is what's going to happen on their favourite shows. Whether it intended to or not, Wikipedia has arguably become the most popular TV listings guide on the planet. With the possible exception of literature, television is the deepest and most penetrative of all forms of pop-culture, and engenders the most fervent interest over long periods; this probably explains why TV, and not films or albums, is the dominant medium on this list. Having said that, this year was also marked by a sharp rise in the popularity of Bollywood, with the Bollywood list becoming a more-or-less permanent fixture in the "Traffic report"—a reflection of the growing importance of Indian users on the English Wikipedia.

What is most interesting is which shows are present and which are not. While American shows predictably dominate (the only non-American show, Doctor Who, owes a substantial portion of its popularity here to its golden jubilee), only The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother regularly appear in the US Nielsen top 25 ratings. The rest are either genre shows likely to appeal to an Internet-friendly audience (Arrow, Doctor Who) or cable shows that draw their audiences through new channels such as Netflix.

The third running theme is people. Despite the overshadowing of Nelson Mandela's death by the more dramatic demise of Paul Walker, Mandela's long illness ensured continuous interest throughout the year and ultimately gave him a leg up in the race to posterity. It's not really surprising who Wikipedia's most popular woman and actor is. The entire world fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence this year; between winning an Oscar (and tripping up endearingly on the podium), generating record-breaking box office for her signature franchise, The Hunger Games, and starring in critically lauded autumn hit American Hustle, there was no shortage of reasons for people to follow her.

While albums didn't make the chart, musicians certainly did. Eminem released an album this year, while Macklemore was the first person since Lisa Loeb in 1994 to release a #1 single without the help of a record label. A surprise visitor was Abraham Lincoln—buoyed, no doubt, by his Oscar-winning eponymous biopic and by the 150th anniversary of his most famous oration, the Gettysburg Address.

What is the most interesting country in the world? Turns out it's the one you, statistically speaking, likely live in. The relative popularity of countries over the year tracks with their number of English speakers likely to have a secure Internet connection. In other words, the more residents likely to access the English Wikipedia, the more popular the country. The only exception, oddly, is Canada, whose citizens are apparently too humble to look themselves up. Incidentally, the same pattern holds true for every other language Wikipedia.

Let me finish by offering a shout to those topics that have intrigued viewers pretty much since the start: Deaths in [insert year here], sex and World War II. These topics know no trend, they follow no pattern; they just are, and always have been. Sex is pretty easy to explain. Just as people have always used dictionaries to look up rude words, so people will always use Wikipedia to learn about verboten topics. As for the other two? The war is still a cultural touchstone in most of the Anglosphere, and certainly in the UK, where I live. And it must be said that besides sex, the one topic that people appear to obsess about the most is death.

Thanks again to readers for all of their support, and I sincerely wish all of you a very happy 2014.

The traffic report is a curated selection of data taken from a bot-generated list. As that includes many entries that are due to botnets, spammers, and DDoS attacks, personal judgments must be made as to which entries are automated, and which derive from honest human interest. Given the limited tools at the Signpost's disposal, the selection of entries and the reasons assumed for their popularity are largely educated guesswork. If you wish to see the original list, free of selection or commentary, it is here.

       

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