Wikipedia and Topical Seasonality

Wikipedia and Topical Seasonality

It's not entirely surprising: People have different areas of interest throughout the year. Consequently, they use the internet for different purposes, which can potentially impact how content producers should tailor their material. Today we take a look at some Wikipedia data that reflects this trend.

According to Compete, there is a dramatic variance in the summer season with regards to which of Wikipedia's Top 100 articles people spend time on:

The big one here is obviously movies, which saw a traffic increase of 18x, much of it related to the huge spate of summer blockbusters in theaters. Meanwhile, the amount of time spent on research articles plummeted by 91%. Max Freiert theorizes that these changes are primarily a result of school being out, with people turning to Wikipedia for entertainment purposes rather than research purposes. Instinctively, and from personal experience, this seems completely plausible.

A significant amount of Wikipedia's traffic is derived from Google searches. This means that people are actively seeking out the topics they spend time with on Wikipedia. For certain kinds of content producers, this means tailoring content to people's seasonal tastes can potentially mean a significant boost in traffic from search. If you want to maximize your readership during all seasons, keep your finger on the cultural pulse and give your audience what it wants.