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Web Survives Jackson Memorial Service

Posted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Arts & Entertainment, Science & Technology, Society.
Jul 7th, 2009 | Comments

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.

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Silhouette

Wow I am shocked that a human died. You'd have thought his fame alone would make him immortal...lol..

And the only thing anyone seems to care about is how famous he is/was.

He was factually as tragic or more than Marilyn Monroe. He was like the circus-freak version of Marilyn. They are both at peace now. That's the very first thing I thought of when he died was "he no longer has to mutilate himself to impress his overbearing daddy who never found him quite good enough, his sexual perversions that undoubtedly came from having predatory behavior modeled to or actually on him..carrying on that fixation". I thought, "he now is at peace".

Death was a blessing in his case.

DLS

I expected the memorial service to be as bad as the media and related celebrity circus surrounding and _dwarfing_ it, but actually the service was okay.

Hopefully the worst of the stupid hype can end now. Some won't end because of the drug-related issues that will emerge later, but hopefully the worst of it is over now, and the networks can return to reporting real news (albeit with leftist bias, still at least reporting about something other than Mr. Jackson now).

I suppose the truth will be reflected in the content of the (honestly advertised as) celebrity and scandal shows -- when they begin reporting on other celebrities and criminal cases, then we know the hype is over.

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