May 12, 2020 - Economy

Statistics website Worldometer sees unprecedented online traffic

Illustration of a computer cursor and a coronavirus

Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

The appetite for coronavirus stats has grown so big globally that traffic to Worldometer, a statistics website run by a group of international developers, surpassed 1 billion visits in April, in line with major platforms like Reddit and ahead of LinkedIn.

By the numbers: Worldometers.info was the #28 most-trafficked website worldwide this month, according to data and analysis from SimilarWeb.

  • That's up 20.6% in traffic from March and up 36,928% from April 2019.

How it happened: Up until January 2020, worldometers.info relied heavily on organic search to drive traffic to the site, at nearly 80% traffic share. 

  • Come February, direct site traffic began to increase, as more people began specifically typing the URL for the site into their browsers.
  • By April, direct traffic made up more 2/3 of the site's referrals.

Be smart: That trend is indicative of significant increases in brand awareness and recognition of this site in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

  • It could be that once users searching for coronavirus tracking pages found worldometers.info, they repeatedly started going back. 

The big picture: The United States made up the largest share of April traffic going to worldometers.info, at 25.8%, followed by India (8.67%), the UK (6.6%), Canada (5.18%), Germany (3.13%), Australia (2.49%), Poland (2.18%), France (1.73%), Turkey (1.66%), and Brazil (1.65%).

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