TechCrunch's flawed reportage about Wikipedia and Tumblr

Recently, TechCrunch did a blog post that Tumblr has surpassed Wikipedia in page views per month with 6.5 billion page views compared to Wikimedia foundation sites's (Wikipedia and its sister sites) only 5.6 billion page views per month. Their reportage is based on data from ComScore, if TechCrunch had  double-checked their source, they would have found that Wikimedia family sites, actually have about 14.6 billion page views. Unlike most other big websites that like to keep their analytic data secret, WMF (my employer) makes all the analytic data that we collect public. If you are a data nerd, you might want to spend few minutes checking stats.wikimedia.org. A side note we are committed to the privacy of our readers, and do minimum tracking. For example, we are one of the few websites that doesn't deploy cookies to track our users. We also use ComScore data to track our unique visitors since we don't deploy cookies on our website, and therefore have no way of figuring out our unique visitors.

Now, going back to the discrepancy between page views. There is obviously a big difference between 14.6 and 5.6 billion. But 14.6 billion is a more reliable stat since it is based on actuals, whereas ComScore data is based on a ComScore panel that has opted in to have their Internet surfing behavior tracked.

As for TechCrunch they should provide a clarification to their story. My colleague Amit Kapoor did point towards the discrepancy in data in the comments section.

Editor Survey Report

Since the beginning of this year, I have been working on the survey of Wikipedia editors. This is the first time WMF (my employer) has conducted a survey of Wikipedia editors internally. We plan to continue doing surveys of Wikipedia editors regularly to keep a tab on the health of  the community.  Finally today, we released the final report from the editor survey. The report can be downloaded as a PDF or read in a Wiki format.http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf

BBM, London riots, teenagers in India

Much has been written about the popularity of BBM (Blackberry Messaging Service) and its role in helping flash mobs organize themselves during the London riots. Blackberry has been primarily geared towards the enterprise market in the US. But clearly Blackberry and its messaging services has resonated with an entire different set of users that Blackberry engineers and designers didn't have in mind. The use of BBM also speaks to improvisational use of emerging technologies for unintended uses. Messaging is great not only for enterprise clients, but also youths organizing themselves in a revolution or a riot.

When I conducted research earlier in the year in India to understand how mobile users in India use the mobile web, I was surprised to find that Blackberry had captivated teenage girl market in India. I interviewed several girls who had upgraded to a Blackberry only to use BBM. As one of them put clearly, "all my friends are chatting on BBM, I have to be there." She told me that all the girls in her high school class had Blackberrys as they wanted to be part of the gossip.  Blackberry has also seen a growth outside of the enterprise market in India because an unlocked Blackberry is available for about Rs 6000 or $150. It does make a good birthday or anniversary gift. When I visited a mobile phone shop at Khan Market in Delhi, I spotted a guy buying a Blackberry as a gift for his girlfriend.

But the future still looks bleak for Blackberry as it continues to lose its market share rapidly. Both Facebook and Apple have launched or plan to launch BBM-styled messaging service. This would make Blackberry less attractive certainly for the teenage girls I met in India: they would rather use Facebook for mass messaging since all their friends are on Facebook already.

New Mobile Readers Survey

At Wikipedia, we have made it our strategic priority to increase mobile page views to 2 billion in the next one year from about 760 million currently. In order to achieve our objective, we are redesigning our mobile site to provide enhanced reading experience and introduce some editing functionalities on the mobile. Me and my wonderful colleague Parul Vora have conducted user experience research in India and Brazil to understand needs of our current and potential mobile users. We are also in the process of launching our mobile survey that we are planning to conduct in 9 languages.
At Wikipedia we have an inclusive culture and encourage participation so I have shared the draft of the mobile survey on our website to elicit feedback on making the questionnaire better. If you are interested, you can take a look at the questionnaire and provide us feedback.

Brazil mobile phone market: Two markets in one country

Pelorhino_ historial center in Salvador

Favela in Salvador

Brazil provides an interesting case study of the mobile phone industry. Like most other countries both in the global south and north, the Brazilian market is dominated by a handful of big players: Oie, Vivo, Claro and Tim. But when it comes to cost of data usage, Brazil almost has two markets: the affluent South and poor North. And the biggest difference between the two markets is cost. While Brazilians living in Sao Paulo or Rio pay almost $80 - $100 for data for the mobile, north Brazilians pay $20 or less in a month for mobile phone data. Why such a remarkable difference in the cost? Simple, people in the North are much poorer than those in the South, and cell phone operators have adopted different strategies for the two regions.  The operators have inflated costs for data in Sao Paulo, Rio and other cities in South because they know people can afford to pay high prices. But in Salvador they offer cheap plans that provide unlimited data access for a day for about  R$ .50 or 30 cents. The plans are pay as you go plans so people can access data if they want and not use it when they don't need it. Everyone I interviewed in Salvador was using these plans and most operators offered similar plans. Most people did not use data pans everyday, they used it only if they needed it.

When I was recently in Salvador (which is capital of the Northern state of Bahia) everyone I met took it upon themselves to educate me about the economic difference between South and North Brazil.  Having visited Sao Paulo last year, I could clearly see the difference between the two places. As a visitor, you can see that Salvador and its population is much poorer compared to Sao Paulo. The roads are less nicer, the hotels although less expensive appear to be dated (my hotel seemed to be a set of a movie from the 1970s), restaurants don't look as upscale as what you would find in Sao Paulo or Rio, and you can't spot  helicopter taxis in the sky that are a fixture in Sao Paulo used by the rich to beat the crazy traffic.

I will do another post about other interesting things that I saw/researched in Brazil.

Indian & Chinese phone manufacturers are here

Chinese phone "iBall" with extra battery pack

On my recent trip to India, I bought mobile testing devices. The Wikimedia engineering team (Tomasz & Patrick) is going to simulate the Wikipedia experience in India on these phones. I found the Indian phone marketplace flooded with new choices. There are obviously usual suspects like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Although, Nokia is losing market share in India rapidly, it continues to be popular among most mobile users. But the devices that I found really interesting were Chinese and Indian knock-off phones like iball (see the picture). Chinese phones started becoming popular and ubiquitous in India about 3-4 years back. The Chinese phones took off because they were cheap and many of phones came with 4-5 external speakers enabling them to double as boom boxes.  But Chinese phones have ever increasing competition for the bottom tier of the market from Indian manufacturers. This year I saw several folks (especially all my taxi drivers) with phones from Indian manufacturers like Micromax and Karbonn. 

These mobiles have several additional features apart from low price point that make them attractive in the Indian market (a) Super loud: Indians like their phones to be loud: loud ringtones, loud music -- boombox style. These phones do exceptionally well in the loudness functionality. Many phones like Nokia Express Music are branded and sold as music phones since people like to listen to their favorite Bollywood songs on their phones. On my last visit, I remember speaking with a villager who had migrated from Bihar to Delhi who had spent almost his entire month salary on a phone that provided him the functionality to listen to music on external speakers.  (b) Dual sim card: Many Indians have 2-3 phone numbers with different service providers to avail of free phone-to-phone calling within the network. Although India has one of the lowest prices for voice calls, people prefer to have more than one number so they don’t have to pay for outgoing phone calls.  Having a phone with a dual sim card means that you are free of the hassle of carrying two phones.  (3) Extra battery power: Many phones come with extra batteries, and extra battery in a place like India is always useful since it is standard to have power cuts. Who knows when you might need the extra juice for the phone since there is always a chance that you might not be able to charge your phone.

I believe that these low-end and knock off phones will squeeze the market for phone manufacturers like Nokia that have made profits on low cost, but high volume sales, and they will also take a slice from the second hand mobile that has been booming in India, Africa and elsewhere.

Welcome to India, Madam

Auto-rickshaw ride 

When I boarded the plane for New Delhi in Munich, a copy of The Times of India, complete with a copy of Delhi Times, beckoned me home. I was a member of the original  team that launched Delhi Times when I worked in TOI in the 1990s right after college. I leafed through the paper to see familiar bylines from some of my old friends and colleagues. It was deja vu & for a brief second I missed seeing my byline in the newspaper. I instantly felt home as memories tumbled, although I have not lived in Delhi for almost 13 years.

Later, the flight attendant walked up to me and said aloud: “Ms Pande, you ordered a special meal.” This caught the attention of the passenger who was sitting in front of me in the airplane. He turned around and inquired, “ Are you a Pande, I am a Tiwari.” Code word for: we are both Brahmins and hail from the Hindi heartland. When he realized that I was traveling alone, he even offered to help me through customs and immigration  since he was some sort of VVIP (although everyone likes to believe they are one) and was being picked up at the plane (no queue to go through immigration), and he was not lying, I did see someone carrying a placard with his name in the restricted zone. I think he made the offer due to our  caste allegiance. My thought: Welcome to India!! A trip to India is not complete without some red tapeism and caste allegiance.  I did not take him up on the offer and decided to go through customs like a normal and weary traveller. 

I will do some more blog posts later on the research that I conducted in India on how users access Wikipedia on their mobile.