At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York last week, one of the sessions was titled Wikipedia and SEO.
The most interesting presentation was given by Don Steele from Comedy Central . Comedy Central uses a lot of different tactics to drive traffic to its web site and one of these tactics is Wikipedia!
When Steven Colbert is not satirizing Wikipedia, the Comedy Central team is in full reputation management mode, making sure that their content is being highly reference and referred on Wikipedia.
As a result of those efforts, Don Steele says that Comedy Central has had up to 90,000 visits a month from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now one of Comedy Central’s top five sources of traffic.
The cost to buy that much traffic from traditional online sources is around $20,000 a month according to Steele. That means that Wikiepdia traffic is worth about $240,000 a year in saved marketing costs to Comedy Central. I bet that makes you look at Wikipedia a little differently.
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IMHO, if you’re so well-known as Comedy Central, this is not a big trick to get 90,000 visits per month from Wikipedia (#3 in Google for “comedy central”)
All they need is to dominate in SERPs for top10.
The point though Sergey is that Comedy Central is getting 90k visitors a month from Wikipedia, not from the search engines. This is in addition to the search engine traffic that they are getting
David, just imagine that Google ranks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy_Central as #1 for “comedy central”. How many traffic will Comedy Central get from Wikipedia?
I think Sergey makes a bit of a point that Wikipedia is probably siphoning off some search traffic that would otherwise go direct to Comedy Central’s brand content properties. It’s hard to really evaluate the impact, as if Wikpedia was out of the top ten, something else would be there that probably would be far less likely to server as a direct referral to Comedy Central’s site.
That being said, it doesn’t undercut at all the importance of a Wikipedia strategy at all as they are in fact featured in the top 10 on Google for most everything.
One big thing going in Comedy Central’s favor is that they are so popular with the demographic that edits Wikpedia that they can get an article for pretty much anything — including each and every episode of South Park.
If the Wikpedians don’t find anything about your business noteworthy enough to merit even one article, then you are facing an uphill battle at Wikipedia in terms of relevancy.
I think I’m going to spend some time looking deeper at Comedy Central’s Wikipedia campaign. From the little bit of poking around I’ve done they are really doing an amazing job.
Sergey good point. I think that Google’s preoccupation with Wikipedia is a little extreme. Never the less, the organic listing I am sure is driving a lot of that traffic.
Hi Mark
You are right about the great job that Comedy Central is doing with Wikipedia. Obviously it is a partnership that works well for both parties, but I don’t know of another web site that takes advantage of Wikipedia’s audience like Comedy Central.