Conservapedia, the infamous evangelical "trustworthy" alternative to wikipedia, claims to have a huge impact on the interweb. "Conservapedia has had over 49,400,000 page views and over 449,000 page edits. The truth shall set you free." Well 49 million page views sounds like a lot, but what's the real story? How big really is Conservapedia's reach? By my reckoning, it's not very big at all. Here are some vaguely scientific statistics and graphs for you.

So the first articles on Conservapedia date back to November 22, 2006, 19 months ago. On average then, that's about 2.5 million page views a month. Now, that sounds like a lot, but it's actually not. To see why, let's look at my own blog. Now, I don't claim to have a big reach, even by science blogging standards - I would estimate I'm about average. Layscience.net receives a tiny 600 visitors a day, and about 30,000 page views per week. Now, I've only been going for 4 months, but if we extend that over 19 months to match Conservapedia, that adds up quite quickly, to about 1,500,000 page views a year, 2,375,000 over 19 months.

Now, a couple of million views sounds a lot, but in no way does it mean my writing would have been read that many times - most of those page views are generated through other activity, bots, crawlers, spammers, and page views generated by embedded images and so on. The numbers sound big, but really it's just the normal activity generated by a blog with several hundred readers.

So, Conservapedia, with all of the fuss it's generated - including coverage in the mainstream media, newspapers, hundreds of blogs, and even television news - is only generating 21x as many page views as a mediocre blog like LayScience.net. But this still isn't the full story.

The next thing we need to remember is that this is a wiki site we're talking about. A user has to browse through several pages to reach the content they want (generating many page views), whereas a blog reader is likely to come straight to an article from a link or RSS feed. And of course, Conservapedia is staffed with a borderline obsessive clique of hundreds of editors, who must generate thousands of page views a day themselves with all their editing activity and discussion in talk pages. If we discount all of that, and just look at "reach", as measured over the last month by Alexa, we get the following graph:

Aside from a lean period in mid-June, when I posted less frequently, LayScience's reach has been consistently around a quarter of Conservapedia's, even matching it at one point. And this blog is hardly a major internet force, and not even a particularly big science blog, just a barely average one.

Then we have the "dilution". I write about 25 articles a month on average, which would add up to 475 over 19 months, whereas the Conservapedians have generated 24,667 in that period, according to its stats page. So LayScience is projected to get 2.375m page views for 475 articles, whereas Wikipedia has achieved 50m for 25,000 articles. That's 5,000pv/a compared to 2,000pv/a for Conservapedia. Now bear in mind that those 5,000 page views only really mean about 5-600 readers for each of my posts, and that I have about 5 times more hits per page views than Conservapedia, and you start to see just how poor Conservapedia's figures really are. And again, a sizable proportion of that measly figure is generated by editing and discussion, and the army of skeptics descending on the site to have a bit of a laugh.

So how do the Conservapedians compare to a top science site, say for instance The ScienceBlogs? Well you can see a comparison of their audience reach below, and the SciBlings absolutely crush the Conservapedians.

(Edit: If this doesn't show for you, check here. )
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So in summary, Conservapedia isn't a major internet force, it's just an incredibly inefficient way of editing and disseminating information. Schlafly and his hundreds of acolytes have spend inordinate amounts of their lives making some half a million edits on 25,000 pages, with the net effect that they've managed to quadruple the audience I get from knocking together corny articles like "Top 10 Parasite photos" in my lunch breaks. Schlafly probably expends the same energy I do just banning users he doesn't like.

So I for one love Conservapedia. Every day that Andrew Schlafly wastes feeding this misguided project, is another day spent burning up the energy of hundreds of "Teh Stupid". God forbid that the site should ever close, and they should turn their efforts on the blogosphere.