Can I qualify before we go any further Maria Belen Chapur is not dead…
That point cleared up – the question is how amazing it is the way we consume media now we have the Internet.
Let me be clear – it is all very sad. Finally years of physical, mental and perscription drug abuse caught up with Michael Jackson and his body decided to called it quits…(Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough…sorry…I couldn’t resist)
I knew about it early Friday morning due to the Twitter messages which had started to flow through TweetDeck. This had all started before Nova here in Melbourne picked up on the story, who reported that they had picked the story up on the Internet media mouse that roars – TMZ.com.
It’s quite obvious that Michael Jackson’s death had a great an impact on the Internet. Akamai, a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, reported that worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson’s death was breaking.
Keynote Systems, a company that provides on-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement solutions, stated that as the news was breaking the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to nearly nine seconds and during the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100 percent to 86 percent.
“So what” you say? I would expect that…Well the interesting stat was that in Europe there was no spike in Internet traffic.
Interoute, Europe’s largest fibre optic voice and data network, reported that traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London were either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London’s case, actually a little lower.
So does this mean that the Europeans don’t care for Michael Jackson – or is it that less bandwidth-heavy social networking such as Twitter (140 character messages) are now the choice of news distribution for this demographic. Hitwise reported that Twitter had its biggest day ever yesterday.
Yahoo released statistics about the impact of Michael Jackson’s death across its various properties citing it is now the highest clicking story in Yahoo’s history. The story on Yahoo.com about Jackson being rushed to the hospital generated 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes while story about his death logged 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes.
Jackson’s death also prompted a number of Internet searches, including queries for:
- how to moonwalk;
- celebrity deaths in threes;
- hoax rumors (related to the fake story of Jeffrey Lynn Goldblum dying in New Zealand);
- cardiac arrest;
- related celebs like Elizabeth Taylor and Lisa Marie Presley;
- the location of Jackson’s home.
- And believe it or not “Who is Michael Jackson?”
Google News actually didn’t go down – they took the site down as a precautionary action because they were convinced they were under a malware attack due to the number of queries.
So – was traffic to News Sites After Michael Jackson Death the highest ever?
The answer is no.
The Obama Election, the World Cup and College Basketball hold the the top three with traffic relating to Michael Jackson actually only about half that seen when President Obama was elected last year according to Akami’s Net Usage Index for News.
How did the Australian population take the news?
While News Limited websites reported a doubling of the number of hits while Facebook and Twitter have been buzzing with messages related to Jackson’s passing oddly enough Jackson’s death was not the number one read item on two of Fairfax’s websites – The Age online and WA Today.
Belen Chapur
The Age’s most popular story was the new providers for the trains and trams of Melbourne while dodgy weather on Rottnest Island causing ferry cancellations was more popular in WA.
And they say today’s newspaper is tomorrows fish and chip wrapper…
