Wikipedia he is getting sick. The causes are not yet known for sure but the bleeding of almost 300 million users in just three months it is practically certain. Indeed, according to the internet data analytics firm SimilarWeb, the largest online encyclopedia is experiencing a sharp drop in users. For a website that boasts around 500 million unique users per month, the drop of 250 million users in three months might seem silly. On the other hand, it is a significant, important drop that testifies to how even the important brands of the internet can experience serious setbacks.
But what are the causes of the strong calo of visits for Wikipedia? It seems that the main suspects are two: the smartphones and Google. But Wikipedia, with regard to visits from Google is quick to hear: "We know that direct traffic from Google has increased in recent months," says the founder of the online encyclopedia Jimmy Wales.
Yet the clue is one that would suggest the exact opposite of Jimmy Wales' words. We are talking about Google Answers, the box that pops up at the top right every time we search on the Mountain View search engine. Among the many failed projects of Big G, however, Google Answer seems to have been absolutely successful: providing the user with a quick answer to his question with 3-4 descriptive lines and the other main information by points was a move that could have brought the number of visits to the Wikipedia site to its knees.
A partially similar discourse is that of the smartphone: users of touch devices, in fact, with a mobile connection (usually slower than a home Wi-Fi connection) are unwilling to wait even a few seconds for the Wikipedia site to load. Much better to quickly read the Google Answers to your "query" on Google. Finally, a mention should also be made of Wikipedia apps which is little used compared to other major applications. A few tens of millions of downloads of the app on smartphones and tablets for the online encyclopedia testify that the Wikipedia brand it is authoritative but that the user does not access it directly. In summary, as a user I end up on Wikipedia mainly because every search I perform is well indexed on Google (or on other search engines) and not because I go directly to the Wikipedia page of what I'm looking for. Then if Google quickly responds to my search with the Answers box, Wikipedia can also be superfluous sometimes.
