The breaking news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death last week dramatically slowed the internet, crippled Google, crashed Twitter, sent iTunes and BitTorrent downloads skyrocketing and made for a huge portion of TV news and radio airplay, according to The Nielsen Company, Billboard and a number of other analysts that tracked coverage of the event.An Online Outpouring
Nielsen reported that Jackson-related news dominated web discussion on June 25, causing huge spikes in traffic and overwhelming social networks with bursts of information and updates from millions of users.
In comparison, the high volume of blog discussions about Jackson made recent buzz around the swine flu scare and President Obama’s inauguration seem paltry and insignificant.
Similarly a Nielsen Buzzmetrics analysis revealed that more than 16% of tweets in the 24-hour period after Jackson’s death mentioned the singer, while less than 2% of mentioned Farrah Fawcett and Iran - two other high-profile news topics during the same time period.
Information from Mashable put the percentage of MJ-tribute tweets higher, at close to 30%, with a reported 50,000 tweets in just one hour. Mashable said that Twitter tracking tool Twist showed 22.61% of Tweets following Jackson’s death with the phrase “Michael Jackson,” 9% containing “MJ,” and 25% including the name “Michael.” Twitter is reported to have crashed at least once during this time.
The ICM News site in the UK reported that search engine Google dramatically slowed down between 2:40 pm and 3:15 pm Pacific time on June 25, as millions of Googlers entering the star’s name got an error page rather than a list of results. These difficulties were later confirmed by Google.
In addition, many entertainment sites slowed significantly and became difficult to access, including celebrity gossip site TMZ.com, according to TechCrunch. TMZ.com first broke the story that Jackson’s heart had stopped and paramedics had been summoned.
MP3 Downloads Surge
Rolling Stone reported that, following Jackson’s death, the top five albums on iTunes, and seven of the Top 10, were all Jackson releases, with The Essential Michael Jackson, Thriller and Off the Wall ranking as the top three.
Similarly, the Amazon MP3 store listed Jackson as the service’s top-selling artist of the day following his death, said Rolling Stone. Last.fm also documented a large increase in listeners to “The King of Pop” in the moments following his passing, with a peak of roughly 42,000 of his songs played on the service between 6 pm and 8 pm ET.
Downloads of Michael Jackson’s music also caused a surge on BitTorrent, where, immediately after his death, the three most active torrents in the music section on the largest torrent indexer, Mininova, were all compilations or discographies from MJ. On top was a torrent listing 30 Michael Jackson albums, The Jackson 5 and The Jacksons, totaling 1.94 GB of music.
ref: http://tinyurl.com/nf9t8q
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