News of Michael Jackson’s death, first confirmed by TMZ on June 25th, 2009, sent a tidal wave across the Internet.
The passing of the King of Pop set multiple records across Yahoo!, the front page story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicked story in Yahoo history, generating a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. In addition Yahoo homepage traffic was five times higher than the amount of traffic it normally receives – Yahoo! News set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing the previous election day record of 15.1 million visitors. Yahoo recorded 175 million page views yesterday, the fourth highest after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike. Whoa!
CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke!
But that’s not all, a Google spokesman told CNET, that some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson. As users flocked to other sites, TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.
AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis, who told CNN that, although the numbers weren’t in yet, the day should prove an historic milestone for mobile internet traffic.
“It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history,” Lewis said. Would you expect anything less from the King of Pop..culture that is?
Will you remember where you were when you found out that Michael Jackson died? Would you compare it with the death of John Lennon, Princess Di? Please take a moment to remember Michael and share some of your favorite Michael Jackson memories with us.
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I will remember. I was actually watching one of the afternoon entertainment shows about the life of Farrah Fawcett when my daughter sent me a text that said the announcer on a radio station just said that according to TMZ, Michael Jackson was dead. I more than remember the deaths of the other two and Elvis. My mom is such a huge Elvis fan she dropped to her knees and cried when she heard the news. It is a sad week in the entertainment world.
It was a real shocker to me when I heard about it. I grew up on his music. My son just learned who he was and said he liked the music. He will definitely not be forgotten for many years.
Hey, nice post, really well written. You should post more about this.