Coming up on the 20^th anniversary of its launch, Wikipedia has established itself as an indispensable tool for people seeking information on a range of topics. With roughly 1.5 billion unique visitors per month, it has become the largest online reference source and one of the most popular websites on the internet. When individuals want to gather new information about a specific company, they often go straight to Wikipedia.

Last week, we launched a new dashboard tracking company Wikipedia page views. With over 1,300 companies and historical data over the past four years, the dataset follows how many different times people have visited a company’s Wikipedia page in a given week, and which companies' view counts are growing and falling the most.

We think that this dataset could be a good indicator of both consumer and investor interest in these companies.

Analysis: Wikipedia Page Views

To test whether Wikipedia page views are a useful factor in predicting short-term stock returns, we did some basic analysis on the historical median weekly performance of companies, based on their Wikipedia view trends over the previous week. We used data from the last four years for this analysis.

The graph below shows the median weekly % stock price change, for different bins of Wikipedia page view trends. The X-axis represents the percent change in Wikipedia page views over the previous week, and the Y-axis shows the total number of instances that fall within that bin.

Overall, we see consistently higher short-term stock performance among companies with Wikipedia page view numbers that are trending upwards.

Companies that had a week-over-week gain in Wikipedia followers had a median price change of +0.322% over the next week, while companies that had a week-over-week loss in followers had a median price change of +0.126% over the next week.

With that in mind, here are some of the companies we think you should keep an eye on over the next week.

Biggest Gainers in Page Views (Week-over-Week) - October 9, 2020

Tejon Ranch Company (TRC): TRC is a real estate development and agribusiness company. In 2019, the company received approval to build 19,000 homes on a previously untouched pocket of CA land 70 miles north of Los Angeles. Recent interest in the firm may stem from both the CA wildfires as well as news this past week that the company is being sued by environmental groups.

Vonage Holdings Corp. (VG): provides cloud communication services for businesses and consumers. Vonage’s stock has increased by over 40% since mid-March when COVID-19 reached pandemic status, and its telemedicine business usage has increased 2,000% in the same time.

Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd (RDY): Dr. Reddy’s is an Indian generic drug company, recently described as a COVID-19 play, as in mid-September they reached an agreement with Russia to conduct clinical trials and distribution of Russia’s COVID-19 Sputnik V vaccine in India. Also in mid-September, Bristol Meyers Squibb arrived at patent settlement with Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, allowing the company to launch its cancer-fighting drug Revlimid in generic form after March 2022. By 2026, Dr. Reddy’s will have a license to sell generic Revlimid with no limits.

Evogene Ltd. (EVGN): Evogene is a computational biology company whose stock performance YTD is at +143%. In early September, they announced a $10M equity led investment by Ark Investment Management. Notably, Evogene has also had the biggest increase in Wikipedia page views over the last month.

Biggest Gainers in Page Views (Month-over-Month) - October 9, 2020

Take Two Interactive Technologies, Inc. (TTWO) is an American video game holding company. COVID has been a boon for video games, and TTWO’s stock is up over 30% for the year.

Summary

We have recently begun scraping and aggregating data on Wikipedia page views, which can serve as a proxy for public interest in the company. We find that historically, companies with trending Wikipedia pages tend to have higher short-term performance.

With our Wikipedia data dashboard, you can easily track which companies have been gaining and losing the most Wikipedia page views over the last week and month. You can also sign up for our API, which allows you to directly integrate this dataset into your own coding projects.