[Michal]

For the last two years the talk in Formula One is about the need to attract the new fans. I found a website showing a number of page visits on Wikipedia. While I was using it for different reasons, I thought it can be a good indicator how fans are gaining interest in F1. My thinking was the race is live on Sunday and having being interested by what they saw they scramble to the Internet for more information. I used a phrase “Formula One” to checks how many people visited this Wikipedia page on exact days, using race Sundays as a reference points.

Here’s what I found out:
1) Number of visits on a day when the season-opening race was held:
2009 – 16.669, 2010 – 13.226, 2011 – 13.125, 2012 – 13.855, 2013 – 13.480, 2014 – 11.475, 2015 – 6.888

2) Number of visits on a day when title was decided in a last race:
2008 – 18.238, 2010 – 21.744, 2012 – 19.335, 2014 – 9.461

3) Number of visits on day when British Grand Prix was being held:
2009 – 9.708, 2011 – 10.094, 2012 – 10.016, 2013 – 7.645, 2014 – 5.125, 2015 – 3.875

Looking at these numbers and also at the trends there is one striking conclusion. F1’s popularity is waning. And fast. Numbers from 2009-2012 are fairly similar and they are ever-so worse from mid-2013. Even very highly rated races like Hungary 2015 struggle to produce 5000 visits while the average was about 10.000 earlier. In my opinion it shows the fans (new and also current ones) are simply being turned off by what they see. While some (like Mercedes) can continue to say it’s not bad, the trend is very very depressing. But I am absolutely not surprised by that.

http://stats.grok.se/ – this is a site from what I have these numbers

[glynh]

That’s interesting to know but I think those figures make it look worse than it is as there’s so many ways to get information now and Wikipedia is losing page views overall. Recently Google has got much better at answering specific questions so you don’t need to actually open pages and a lot of people will find F1 information on other sites or Facebook. Also (I’m not sure) but F1 is gaining fans in new countries so presumably they use local sites instead.

F1 does seem to be slightly less popular (in the UK at least)and I think that’s mostly due to casual fans missing the races on Sky and that also making it very hard to engage new fans.

I think the only accurate measurement is TV audiences (and to a lesser extent track attendance) but it’s extremely hard to find accurate figures across all ways of watching.

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