4 ms·

I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone anywh

I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone anywhere. The massive increase in mobile traffic is coming from people who formerly didn't use the internet except when they had to. Mothers, cricketers, grandfathers, plumbers. All those people who you could never see hunched in front of a keyboard are now discovering the internet via their fancy status-symbol phones. Which is cool and all, but importantly it means wikipedias editors, and desktop users in general, aren't reducing. There's as many of them as there ever were, and their growth rate probably hasn't slowed either. I imagine the venn diagram of "people inclined to edit an online encyclopedia" and "people who will find a mobile phone claustrophobic" is probably pretty much a perfect circle.

sparkzilla 11y ago
I agree that the number of mobile users isn't a factor in declining editor numbers, but the absolute number of editors is in serious decline. It's already evident that many lightly trafficked pages are not being updated. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...
lnanek2 11y ago
As a Facebook stock owner, yes the desktop numbers are going down in general. They took a huge hit when traffic started moving to mobile and they weren't showing ads there yet, then a corresponding rise when they moved the ads to where the people are going. You can find it in their reports. Wikipedia is no doubt the same.
- apta 11y ago
  What is the relevance of you being a FB stock owner to the rest of your comment?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    It presumably means s/he was paying closer attention than most.
fweespeech 11y ago
Yeah, traditional desktop users who were "casual" are dropping the desktop for mobile. #DayJob is primarily used by non-technical people and we've actually lost a significant amount of traffic on the Desktop. I'm talking based on user accounts that are still active after at least a year. [e.g. YoY, we'll see them switch from 100% Desktop to 100% Mobile in some cases.] Its too hard to tell the difference on "newer" accounts but the share of Mobile to Desktop traffic is definitely moving in Mobile's favor.
adventured 11y ago
One of the best, directly measured sources for this: https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com Says that desktop is mostly flat, more than it is evaporating. Wikia has a vast amount of traffic, as one of the top ~20 sites in the US. If you take their average monthly desktop numbers from August 1st 2013 to now, there has been zero decline. Would this premise hold true for sites like Twitter and Facebook? Probably not. Social sites with photo sharing are likely far more prone to erosion on the desktop.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Wikia has a lot of content that is desktop gaming related. Does that skew their figures?

sparkzilla 11y ago

I agree that the number of mobile users isn't a factor in declining editor numbers, but the absolute number of editors is in serious decline. It's already evident that many lightly trafficked pages are not being updated. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...

lnanek2 11y ago

As a Facebook stock owner, yes the desktop numbers are going down in general. They took a huge hit when traffic started moving to mobile and they weren't showing ads there yet, then a corresponding rise when they moved the ads to where the people are going. You can find it in their reports. Wikipedia is no doubt the same.

apta 11y ago
What is the relevance of you being a FB stock owner to the rest of your comment?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  It presumably means s/he was paying closer attention than most.

fweespeech 11y ago

Yeah, traditional desktop users who were "casual" are dropping the desktop for mobile. #DayJob is primarily used by non-technical people and we've actually lost a significant amount of traffic on the Desktop. I'm talking based on user accounts that are still active after at least a year. [e.g. YoY, we'll see them switch from 100% Desktop to 100% Mobile in some cases.] Its too hard to tell the difference on "newer" accounts but the share of Mobile to Desktop traffic is definitely moving in Mobile's favor.

adventured 11y ago

One of the best, directly measured sources for this: https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com Says that desktop is mostly flat, more than it is evaporating. Wikia has a vast amount of traffic, as one of the top ~20 sites in the US. If you take their average monthly desktop numbers from August 1st 2013 to now, there has been zero decline. Would this premise hold true for sites like Twitter and Facebook? Probably not. Social sites with photo sharing are likely far more prone to erosion on the desktop.

DanBC 11y ago
Wikia has a lot of content that is desktop gaming related. Does that skew their figures?