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Michael Jackson's death prompts record traffic for Yahoo, Google sites

Thursday July 28th 2009

By: Franck Robert

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Tweets about the pop icon comprised 30 percent of total volume on Twitter, and that might be a conservative estimate.

Since then, we’ve learned a lot more about the story’s impact on the Web, and we now have some fascinating numbers and charts from Google, Yahoo, and others about how the Michael Jackson news impacted their services.

In the hours during and after the news of Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest and ensuing death…

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Michael Jackson’s – Internet Dead Wave…

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Michael Jackson’s – Internet Dead Wave…

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Michael Jackson’s – Internet Dead Wave…

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First, leading widget network reports that the Jackson story was actually most shared on Facebook and not Twitter.

That’s not altogether surprising considering that Facebook’s userbase is still much larger, but the more real-time Twitter grabbed the early headlines.

Meanwhile, Yahoo writes on its blog that its Yahoo News property set an all-time record for traffic, registering 16.4 million unique visitors. That beats out election day, where site saw 15.1 million visitors (what this says about our society, we’ll leave to the comments).

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Finally, New Media Strategies notes that Jackson’s Wikipedia page logged 1.8 million visitors yesterday, compared to its daily average of just 20,000. It also saw a whopping 650 edits as users updated the entry furiously as news broke.

What to make of all these numbers? Simply that Jackson’s sudden and shocking death is one of the biggest news stories in recent memory, and will likely continue to dominate online chatter over the next few days.

Google didn’t provide any specific numbers regarding search volume, but notes the huge impact it has had on search trends over the past 24 hours.

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Michael Jackson’s – Internet Impact…

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Social Media Figures:

A story on Yahoo.com about Jackson being rushed to the hospital generated 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, and a subsequent story about his death logged 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes, Yahoo wrote in a blog post.

On Yahoo News, the section had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million visitor record set on Election Day.

Overall, Yahoo News logged 175 million page views – the fourth highest after Election Day, January 22, and Hurricane Ike.

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Jackson's death also prompted a number of Internet searches, including queries for: how to moonwalk; celebrity deaths in threes; hoax rumors; cardiac arrest; related celebs like Elizabeth Taylor and Lisa Marie Presley; and the location of Jackson's home.

Meanwhile, about 21,000 people left comments on a blog post about Jackson. And more than 4,000 Jackson-related images have been posted to the Yahoo-owned Flickr photo-sharing site.

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Yahoo was not the only site to see traffic spikes. So many queries came into Google News in the minutes after the news broke that the search engine giant thought it was under attack, and the site was intermittently unavailable.

Google also reported the largest mobile search spike in its history, with 5 of the top 20 searches about Jackson, Pittman said.

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Overall search volume started to spike around 2pmPacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and stabilized by8pm.

The majority of Thursday's hot trends related toJackson's death, Google said.

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News of Michael Jackson's death resulted in recordtraffic on many websites,

Including Yahoo and Google.

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Thursday July 28th 2009

By: Franck Robert