In news that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Michael Jackson’s sobering memorial service this morning will go down as one of the most watched web events, ever. As we reported earlier, the social web was well prepared for today’s ceremony, with sites including MySpace, Ustream (in partnership with CBS), Facebook (in partnership with CNN), and Hulu offering live streams, most of which also allowed viewers some way to interact with each other.
It’s still a little too early to determine just how widely watched the ceremony was, especially since traffic was distributed across many sites, but we’re already beginning to see some staggering preliminary numbers.
In the time window from 12AM to 4PM EST, Web analytics company Omniture reports that CNN saw:
- 72 million page views
- 10.8 million unique visitors
- 8.9 million live video streams
CDN server logs also indicate that CNN saw a peak of 781,000 concurrent live streams at its peak.
We’ve also gotten some numbers from Ustream:
- 4.6 million total streams
- 1.6 million total unique visitors
- 12,000 messages per minute sent through chat/Ustream’s Social Stream
Update: Facebook has sent us their finalized stats, taken from all partner sites that integrated its stream of real-time updates. In total, the social network reports that 1 million users posted approximately 800,000 status:
CNN:
- 733,000 status updates
- 759,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
- 6,000 updates/minute at the peak
E! Online:
- 9,000 status updates
- 87,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
ABC:
- 48,000 status updates
- 97,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
MTV:
- 5,000 status updates
- 21,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
Very impressive numbers to be sure, but they don’t surpass those of President Obama’s inauguration, which was the last web event to draw this much attention from the social web. During the inauguration, the CNN/Facebook live stream drew 13.9 million live streams between 6 AM and 11:45 AM ET, with millions more during the course of the day, and a peak of 1.3 million concurrent streams.
Photograph by xero79
Can you do a comparison to Obama’s Inauguration numbers to better understand these numbers?
I would love to see the comparison too.
Some comparison to the Obama inauguration is now coming in.
On Yahoo News, Obama’s inauguration generated 329 million page views from 12.3 million users.
Today event was indeed big, as Michael Jackson was going to perform at his own Memorial Service [Pic]:
http://www.flic...oul/3697891247/
Here’s the TC article on the Obama Inauguration #s http://www.tech...cebook-friends/
Simple answer: Obama blew MJ away.
Numbers seem to be very close to me.
Actually the inauguration saw significantly more traffic.
you mean about twice as much.
Its really funny to think about these numbers, though.
MJ memorial service – X viewers
Obama, becoming the president of US as the first black president ever – 2X viewers
Good to hear it was “significantly more traffic”, I was starting to think the human race was going to shmit.
Surprising. Thanks for the link, Michael.
Thank God.
hi
What was the total audience for this including live, tv and web? It may have been the largest event ever, and I missed it. Dang.
That is *a lot* of page views.
Wake Up!
Dont’ forget that the “Media” uses distraction as a method of populous control. A distraction for the real issues at hand (e.g., Universal “Heath Care”, Korea missile threat, Obama tank ratings, etc).
I subscribe to the latter.
Don’t be deceived by the “Government Media Complex”!!!!
I wasn’t watching. Have better things to do, don’t you?
You’re in denial. Get a life.
seriously? you are in denial.
we all know you have absolutely nothing to do… dont lie to us and to yourself.
I am surprised you didn’t mention anything about MSNBC – their feed was really good and had a great Twitter integration with Tinker.
I am interested to see how they compared to CNN any data?
Read the Communist Manifesto..
You Numb-Nut:
Read http://en.wikip...unist_Manifesto
The USA is hitting rock bottom, before your very eyes. Sincerely just trying to help (no animosity intended).
Include bringing Google down
This is a screenshot of what twitter was going through when the memorial was on. http://i25.tiny....com/wujggz.jpg
I waited for 20mins before I could access twitter. I think MJ’s memorial was the biggest event this generation had ever witnessed.
The problem was, if one wanted to watch TV, one may have tuned in MJ, so the results may be stilted. The coverage was unfathomably overwhelming, much to the detriment of those who might have other interests.
CNN had the live stream but it was spotty.
And here’s data from Y! http://twitter....atus/2522380667
“1 million users posted approximately 800,000 status”…maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand how 1 million users can post 800,000 status. If every user only posts 1 status update, there would be already 1 million status updates or am I getting something wrong here?
Where I can watch a live telecast??
It’s LED Display …
It’s most likely on youtube by now.
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