With time to prepare, video sites and social networks appear to have kept running smoothly during the Michael Jackson memorial service and tribute:
“Overall, the Internet is holding up great,” said Jennifer Donovan, a spokeswoman for Akamai, a company that handles Internet traffic for a variety of large clients. “We have not heard of any sites being down during this event.”
Traffic to news sites supported by Akamai peaked at 3.9 million visitors a minute at the start of the memorial service before sharply dropping off, suggesting that people were sticking with the live video streams rather than surfing around. By comparison, on June 25, when word began to circulate of Mr. Jackson’s hospitalization and death, Akamai said that traffic to news Web sites topped out at 4.2 million visitors a minute.
Traffic to live video streams drew the most attention: As of 3 p.m. New York time, close to 3 million video streams were being watched online, about three times the average, according to Akamai.
Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee reports that MSNBC.com had 3 million live streams, more than 82 million page views and 7 million unique visitors, as of 5 p.m. EDT. And that the following was sent out to members of Official Group for Media & Analysts Following Facebook:
There were a total of about 1 million users posting approximately 800,000 status updates on Facebook related to the live online broadcasts by CNN, E! Online, ABC and MTV of the Michael Jackson memorial service. Here is a breakdown by web site: 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 For context, there were 1.8 million Facebook status updates with the word “Obama” on Inauguration Day in the U.S. – an event that was broadly publicized for months leading up to it.
GigaOm has more details on response time, noting there were widespread slowdowns.
Following up SWARAAJ CHAUHAN’s post earlier this afternoon, Obama wins. For the inauguration of President Obama in January the CNN/Facebook 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.