According to Politico, approximately 7,000 sites are taking part in today’s protest against the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Sites including Wikipedia and Craigslist have “gone black” in protest and to raise awareness of these acts. Rather than a traditional “Google Doodle” for the Google logo, Google covered its logo in black and clicking on the image redirects users to a page where they can learn about SOPA and PIPA, and choose to contact Congress or disseminate information through social networks.

Ten statistics worth noting:

1. Wikipedia is the 15th largest website in the US, capturing 14 million visits a day.

2. There are some jokes about “kids today” using Wikipedia for research rather than physical books. With that in mind, it may surprise people to know that the 18-24 age group actually under-indexes for visits to Wikipedia. The site’s traffic share by income group aligns with the distribution of online population.

3. Craigslist’s parent site captures 4 million visits a day. All told, Craigslist properties combined capture 47 million visits a day – meaning almost 50 million visits will be impacted by Craigslist going dark, although there is a link on the page to continue to the normal website.

4. In fact, the search term “Craigslist” produces the third most traffic in the US.

5. Wikipedia is a top recipient of searches for presidential candidates’ names.

6. The audience for Change.org, a site which encourages social enterprise site which allows users to create petitions, skews towards the least and one of the most affluent income groups.

7. Entertainment and Media categories are some of the top recipients of Wikipedia traffic; the Federal Government category comes in 12th.

8. Wikipedia ranks as the 4th largest recipient of Search traffic.

9. Reddit, a news aggregator which has gone dark today, drives much of its traffic to Entertainment and Media categories, impacting websites that rely on Reddit’s referrals.

10. Searches for variations of SOPA and PIPA were (day of 1/16/12) driving about half as much search traffic as searches for variations of “Kim Kardashian”. To put that into perspective, searches for Ms. Kardashian drive 6 times more traffic than searches for President Obama.

The impact of today’s protests on web behaviors promises to be considerable. We will follow-up with information about today’s traffic to petitions and government sites, along with search trends.