Biggest online event to date?
Michael Jacksons memorial which was held in Los Angeles was expected to become one of the most popular internet events to date, and the figures are huge, however it wasn’t enough to top the web traffic for Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.
Web users globally were able to watch the memorial from many online sources including Facebook and MySpace.
CNN.com’s coverage which partnered with Facebook drew 8.9 million views, with 781,000 concurrent viewers. The CNN site saw 72 million page views and 10.8 million unique visitors falling well short of Obama’s viewing figures.
Facebook itself saw 733,000 status updates and 759,000 members watching through CNN's live stream. At its peak 6,000 updates were posted every minute.
Twitter was dominated by Michael Jackson tweets, all ten twitter trending topics were related to Jackson at one point during the day. The term 'Michael Jackson' was generating 80,000 tweets per hour.