Apart from the weather in the UK, the major story capturing headlines over the last few days has been the sensational reveals from Wikileaks.
Major caches of US intelligence from the embassy cables were leaked from the website, creating a furore of media attention. Visits to the Wikileaks website tripled on Monday as the first leaks were posted online.

On 29 November, ‘wikileaks’ was the 13th most popular search term typed into all search engines, although UK Internet users were also clearly worried about the snow, with ‘bbc weather’, ‘met office’ and ‘weather’ all appearing higher than ‘wikileaks’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the websites that benefited from traffic on Monday for the search term ‘wikileaks’ were news content sites. The top news sites to receive traffic from ‘wikileaks’ were The Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mail.

Compared to Monday 22 November, visits to the Telegraph website increased by 7.13% whilst visits to the Daily Mail actually decreased by 5.48% on 29 November. The Guardian, which had secured a number of exclusive deals with Wikileaks saw an 17.83% uplift in traffic between the two Mondays.
On 29 November, ‘wikileaks’ was the third biggest search term driving traffic to The Guardian website after ‘guardian’ and ‘the guardian’ – showing the importance of the search term to the performance of the website that day.

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