Wikipedia: The Taylor Swift Effect

What happens when the world’s biggest pop star starts to date one of the most popular football players in the NFL? Madness. The answer is madness. Taylor Swift has been making a name for herself since she hit the music scene at the age of 14, becoming the youngest to ever get a record deal. Her following since then has grown more and more over the years. Fast forward to 2023 when she set out for her second ever all-stadium tour, “The Eras Tour.” To no surprise, this tour has become the largest tour any artist has ever been on, grossing over $5 billion, and attracting some of the craziest “Swifties” to cities all over the country.

This level of fame comes with a price, however. Her life is always on display and anyone she enters a relationship with gets put up on the same pedestal. In comes Travis Kelce, the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. In July, Kelce was spotted attending one of Taylor’s shows, and rumors of them “hanging out” began. Since then the internet has been all over this story from Kelce making hints at the relationship on his podcast, ESPN talk show hosts referencing her music when talking about the Chiefs, and her fanbase playing detective and realizing that their social media accounts are gaining more and more similar followers. Wikipedia has been a backbone of the internet for many years now, and whenever something happens in the real world and people start doing their own internet searches, Wikipedia editors are quick to respond and pageviews soar. With this truth being known, I wanted to dive into Wikipedia’s data about these two stars to see how Taylor Swift’s new relationship with Travis Kelce affected pageviews online.

This investigation started with gathering the page views for the two stars starting in September of 2023. Starting here doesn’t change much, but the football games that took place during this month had a lot of buzz and the relationship was much more public at this time. At first glance, there was a clear overlap in the trends on the “Taylor Swift” and “Travis Kelce” pages, but there was more data to gather. Most Wikipedia pages have other pages that get redirected back to them. For example, if you search for “T-Swizzle” on Wikipedia, you get sent to the “Taylor Swift” page. These redirect pages each have their own set of data so my next step was to find all these pages and combine their pageviews to have a dataset that captured all searches for each star. I merged these datasets together and I was ready to begin my analysis.

Both stars had a peak pageview on September 25th, the day after Taylor attended her first Chiefs game and was spotted by fans. Kelce’s pages had 747,490 views and Taylor’s 326,069. Kelce had an incredible game that day and after scoring a touchdown he danced to one of her songs in celebration. This game wasn’t the only one when pageviews spiked. After graphing the pageviews for both starts, I annotated the graph to show each football game since they publicly announced they were dating and color-coded these annotations based on Taylor’s attendance at the games. For most of the time, Taylor has had more eyes on her than Kelce has, but this relationship has truly boosted his Wikipedia status and after each game, his page has had a surplus of viewers.

Although this shows that their relationship has led to more online eyes, I knew that there was more to this story so I set out to collect another dataset. Many memes have surfaced since this relationship began about the Swifties not knowing much about football, Travis Kelce, or the Chiefs. With this in mind, I had a theory, those looking up Kelce were probably also looking into the Chiefs. As I did with the other Wikipedia pages, I found the redirecting pages and added up the pageviews for all pages that lead back to the main page, “Kansas City Chiefs.” I merged this with the pageviews of Taylor and Kelce and plotted these again.

These pages spiked after the first football game of the season on September 7th with 27,106 views. At first, we don’t see much since proportionally these pages do not get a lot of views to those of Traylor or Kelce. So I decided to look at just the Chiefs data with the games annotated. This graph tells a clearer story. As we can see after each game the pageviews spike. It’s hard to tell if this is the Swifties doing or not, but I think yes since the spikes are greater after games she attended then games she didn’t attend.

This relationship has taken over my social feeds and has warmed the hearts of Taylor and football fans alike. Their social presence has been just as influential as their online presence and Wikipedia proves it. I hope that their “Love Story” truly fulfills all of Taylors’ “Wildest Dreams” and that they last “Forever and Always.”