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Update of TikTok referrals
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Description

Name for main point of contact and contact preference

Marshall Miller (please contact me on Slack)

What teams or departments is this for?

Product and Partnerships

What are your goals? How will you use this data or analysis?

This analysis will help us determine strategic priorities around working with TikTok.

What are the details of your request? Include relevant timelines or deadlines

In T289268: [REQUEST] Impact of TikTok's Jumps feature on Wikipedia traffic, @nshahquinn-wmf showed us the count of referrals to Wikipedia from TikTok over time. We would like an update of this data, and we're hoping the lift is low given that the code has already been written. I want to be specific that the behavior we're trying to detect is one in which a TikTok user taps a link to Wikipedia and the Wikipedia article opens up inside the TikTok app as opposed to opening it in Chrome/Safari. Does the method used in T289268 count those sorts of referrals?

This time, there are a few focuses:

  • The time series should start on October 1 and extend as late as possible, broken out by day.
  • We need to look at the time series in four geographies:
    • We need a graph for data from the United Kingdom.
    • We need a graph for data from Japan.
    • We need a graph for data from the Philippines.
    • We need a graph for data from the United States.

Is this request urgent or time sensitive?

We would like to have this by December 12.

Event Timeline

The results are available in this Google doc (WMF only). Some of the results are publicly available in my research notebook on GitHub.

I'm copying the key non-confidential findings here for public access (the key confidential findings are country-specific traffic counts, which include countries on the country protection list).

Overall TikTok-referred traffic

Current (Sep-Dec 2022)

Average daily traffic: 10,300 page views

2022-12_daily_TikTok_traffic.png (1×2 px, 346 KB)

Previous (Aug-Oct 2021), from T289268

Average daily traffic: 46,000 page views

tiktok traffic.png (490×888 px, 46 KB)

TikTok traffic by source

Looking at traffic we recorded from TikTok's in-app browser, we see the following daily averages:

referrer typeaverage daily page views
TikTok10,218
other external1,397
internal464

Very roughly, we can interpret this to mean that every day TikTok generates about 10,000 visits to Wikipedia, and during about 10% of those visits, the user also follows an internal link to a second Wikipedia page.

We also get about 100 pageviews per day with a TikTok referrer but from a different browser. These likely come from the web version of TikTok.