OK, in my last post Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news source….For Woman? we found the likely audience for Wikipedia is 90% woman and we most frequent spellings and misspellings to come up with a large swath of searches who looked for Wikipedia in May 06 and the first half of June 06.  Here’s the details.

Let’s answer the 5 W’s - Who, What, When, Where and Why of Wikipedia.

We know the first - Who (90% Woman with be basic age of 25 to 34 years of age).  But there’s a disconnect between the Audience that Microsoft’s AdLabs Beta tool says Wikipedia.com appeals to (audience) and those who Microsoft AdCenter says actually search for Wikipedia and related terms to use the site.  This is a problem with the immature nature of the tools we’re using and will be solved in time (next 3-5 years, as the tools mature).

There were more Females searching for Wikipedia who were 18-25 years old, but above that age it was equal or Males dominated.  So we see two views, those who search for Wikipedia are not neccessary the same audience as those who use it regularly and whom the site appeals to.

It reminds me of an old saying that goes something like this: "You search for what you are not".  For example: If your poor, you look for rich people, because you want to be rich, not because you are rich.  Sure, if your poor you might gravate to other people who are also in the same situation - but what you look for, what you search for, is something that’s often what you are not (or what you need).  These are just examples, no need to take take the example literally.

When are they looking/searching?  Mondays are peak, then it declines over the week and drops to a fraction of the searches over the weekend.

This pattern is looking alot like a corporate site actually!  Many sites like HP, IBM, Sun have traffic demand patterns that peak during the week but drop significantly over the weekends because the audience is CORPORATE and most corporarte workers don’t work that much on the weekends (at least, not in the US, where this data is based on).  I think we can say the same for June 06 (partial) but demand is pretty stable for most of the working week and then drops on the weekend.

Where are they looking?

The main group of searchers are located in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and Chicago but if you take all of the slices in the pie, you get the total of 400,062 searches for Wikipedia on MSN last month.  Sure, there’s limitations to this information, but it’s also great for Geo Targeting, such as it already is.

To digress, say I’m an author, like Howard Reingold of SmartMobs, and i write a book and go on a book tour, and my publisher researches where the most people who are reading or would read his books might be located.  Might I want to schedule book signings in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Seattle (and the rest of the cities in the Pie Chart)…you bet I would - because the people searching would be located in those cities and therefore, most likely to buy the book or want to attend a  book signing.

We can also see the the amount of money people who searched for Wikipedia have in the bank (according to AdCenter) is:

About 1/8th (55,000 searchers) MSN could not qualify the wealth of, the rest, 180,000+ were well to do while 150,00 were probably economically challanged (most of us are actually).  We don’t really know the income levels that each of these listings above matches up with, however, so I’m just taking a guess on this one.

About half of the searches for Wikipedia could not be classified by Geo Demographic cluster group but the other half (200,000) fall under Urban Lower Income (45,000 searches/searchers) and then Prosperous Family (about 25,000).  You can get the breakdown of what these different cluster groups mean just by looking at the Mosaic Global E Handbook .

Yes, the technology is something that needs to be improved, but I think already we could get another SmartMobs type book out of the changes that would be coming from the Search Revolution. It’s already happening, …. it’s begun and there’s no stopping it. 

It looks like the names for the cluster groups might be changing again, Prosperous Family is not even in the Global E-Handbook, so you might need to go right to Experian to get the latest set of Geo Demographic cluster definations.

So to summerize both this post and the last one Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news source….For Woman? this is what we learned about Wikipedia that could be valuable for a Web Analyst.

• Wikipedia appeals mostly to woman ages 18-34 according to Microsoft AdLabs Demographic Prediction Demo.
• The words used to search (about 400,000 searches in MSN alone last month based around Wikipedia) showed a different makeup which more woman 18-24 looking than anyone else, but a more mixed group of male/females for the rest of age/sex groups.
• About half the searchers were well to do financially and many were located in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Seattle.
• The Geo Deographic cluster groups most responding to Wikipedia and searching for it were a mixture of Urban Lower Income and Properous Family and you can get the definations of the lifestyle and locations they live by going directly to Experian and asking them for it.

I’ll devote one more post to looking at what happens after people come to Wikipedia.  I can’t really tell you the details of what this population searched for (we can guess) on Wikipedia, but I can look at some other general indications that might tell us something.

And maybe I’ll also be able to pull some traffic numbers too.