Wikipedia is now a top-ten US Internet site — totally amazing. That’s according to comScore (see SEL post for more traffic details). It’s also a top-ten US brand according to Brandchannel.
Google helped build the Wikipedia brand by treating it as an authoritative source and sending so much traffic there (Hitwise, via Battelle, who predicts AdWords coming soon to Wikipedia):
Wikipedia is “owned” and managed by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It’s a remarkable phenomenon, so remarkable in fact that if you were to pitch this idea today to a panel of VCs nobody would fund it. It doesn’t make sense, yet it exists, succeeds and now has more brand recognition (according to the Brandchannel survey) than Nike or Coke in North America.
