Some numbers related to last nights office hours.

A linear extrapolation of this [1] images predicts an internet penetration of 38 internet users per 100 innhabitants world wide in 2015. Further the human population of the world in 2015 can be expected to be around 7 billions [2] (today it seems to be about 6,8 billion [3]). That means 2.66 billion internet users in 2015.

Today the number of internet users is 1.8 billion [4], and Philippe said that the number of visitors each month now are 371 million [5]. That means a Wikimedia per internet user ratio that is 371/1800 = 0.206.

With the same Wikimedia penetration in 2015 that means 0.206*2660 = 548 million visitors per month. I think this at least should be a lower limit for the estimate of the number of visitors in 2015. This is where we can go without any internal initiatives, it will hopefully follow as a natural consequence of the growth of number of internet connections. With internal initiatives we should aim higher. If we can push the Wikimedia per interner user ratio from 0.2 to 0.3, we are up at 0.3*2660 = 798 million visitors per month.

This might not seem intuitive, but ratios tend to be iron laws. For example, in shareware it is usually expected that 1% of people who try it will pay for it. No matter what you do, that's how it goes. So marketers try to focus on getting more people to try it, rather than trying to push people to try harder to pay for it.

That said, it's at least worth trying to bump up the ratio. But .2 to .3 is literally a 50% increase. You won't find too many companies to bump their sales up that much unless they were very very new. Even .25 would be huge (a 25% increase), but we don't want to be too pessimistic either. We set goals not so that we reach them, but so that we strive and succeed just for having tried.

Corrected that. With 371 billion unique visitors per month, I think we should be occupied with figuring out the problem with the statistics, rather than how to increase these numbers =)

-)