Updated 1/19: we have updated charts and the narrative to reflect all of 1/18 (protest timeframe) data and the first 10 hours of today. The last graph shows about a 365% increase in visits to their SOPA Initiative page and >77% increase across SOPA related page visits during the protest - this visually shows the success of Wikipedia's protest in which it is successfully spreading their message and educating visitors on SOPA. The middle graphs visually show an increase in unique visitors, while the number of transactions per visitor decreases throughout the protest - a phenomena that we have called "online rubber necking," in which visitors are there to see the protest page and perhaps inform themselves about the issue but are not accessing the site in the "normal" manner in which many more pages/media files are accessed.
If you want a quick way of increasing traffic to your website - change or take down portions of your website in protest ... at least that is what we have gleaned from today's (1/18) Wikipedia protest against SOPA. There will likely be other blog posts and stats released on the results of this and other cyber protests - here is what we have seen from traffic thus far that has passed through one of Zscaler's clouds.
We observed a noticeable percentage increase in the unique visits (by client IP address) to Wikipedia comparing the protest timeframe to the surrounding dates:
However, these additional visitors are not incurring that much more bandwidth for Wikipedia - we have noticed only a slight percentage increase in Wikipedia web transactions today. See the chart below to see the slight increase in number of transactions per hour:
![Image](/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto/sites/default/files/images/blogs/-Bt9SbLEKoaU/Txhl9b-zqeI/AAAAAAAAA2o/Q8JxcmM-IvE/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2012-01-19%2Bat%2B1.52.12%2BPM.png)
We observed significantly more visits to Wikipedia's main page and SOPA Initiative page than the surrounding dates - further corroborating our above statements:
![Image](/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto/sites/default/files/images/blogs/-TXL_8LPEhM0/TxhmlrY7R9I/AAAAAAAAA3A/2JzZapIybQw/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2012-01-19%2Bat%2B1.54.53%2BPM.png)