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Traffic report

A year stuck in traffic

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By Serendipodous
Leading cast of the long-running US TV series Breaking Bad ... one of the most accessed articles on the English Wikipedia during 2013.
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 B-class 30,437,829
2 Deaths in 2013 List 21,032,962
3 Breaking Bad B-class 17,184,556
4 Google Good Article 16,930,496
5 World War II Good Article 16,632,652
6 Youtube Good Article 15,863,520
7 List of Bollywood films of 2013 List 15,734,806
8 United States B-Class 15 324 117
9 The Walking Dead (TV series) Good Article 14,506,197
10 Game of Thrones B-Class 14 222 748
11 Yahoo! C-Class 13,473,783
12 Nelson Mandela Good Article 13,239,155
13 The Big Bang Theory C-Class 12,843,248
14 Arrow (TV series) C-Class 12,285,242
15 Wikipedia Good Article 12,119,569
16 India Featured article 11,799,639
17 How I Met Your Mother C-class 11,744,355
18 Jennifer Lawrence B-class 11,335,347
19 Sex B-class 11,180,431
20 Eminem Good Article 11,113,512
21 IPv6 C-Class 10,547,448
22 Macklemore C-Class 10,376,268
23 Abraham Lincoln B-class 10,103,779
24 Doctor Who B-class 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.