Millions watched Michael Jackson's memorial online
Yesterday's live video stream of Michael Jackson's memorial didn't knock news websites to their knees as the first reports of the King of Pop's death did. It did, however, usher in a new era as millions chose to follow the memorial on sites like CNN.com and Facebook instead of TV.
While millions of people were still glued to their TV sets for the memorial service, global Web traffic shot up by 33% during the event. The number of online visitors was so staggering that the memorial can easily be listed as one of the biggest online events in history.
CNN.com alone received 81 million page views, 11.8 million unique visitors, and 9.7 million live-video streams with a maximum of 781,000 concurrent viewers. However, it was the Facebook-CNN integration that engaged most users. A massive 300,000 users were already logged on to Facebook when the service started, and 6,000 status updates related to the King of Pop's memorial service were recorded every minute. This toppled the 4,000 status updates per minute recorded during Barack Obama's inauguration.
Besides CNN, E! Online, MTV, and ABC News also partnered with Facebook. (See updated viewership statistics on Facebook here.)
Other services that featured live streaming of the event include UStream/CBS, Hulu/Fox News, MSNBC, Justin.tv, SkyNews, InMusic, and MySpace.
Image from Flickr user Bernissimo, Digitalbeat
Sign-up for exclusive tech updates
RELATED ARTICLES
COMMENTS
-
cweesy: Watched it online, too! I wish other sports or major events would do (legal) live streaming as well with Facebook integration. That would be cool.July 15, 2009 at 7:39 pm
-
iacer: nice site!July 16, 2009 at 1:19 am
