The news of Michael Jackson’s death was enough to bring popular entertainment sites to a complete standstill.
Michael Jackson could always stop the presses.
His death was confirmed at 3:15pm Los Angeles time but by then there were already thousands of tributes been uploaded to entertainment sites such as TMZ.com and social sites including Twitter.
To put it in perspective there were:
- Over 50,000 tweets about Michael Jackson’s death in just one hour
- 23% of all tweets contained the words “Michael Jackson”
- In total, 30% of all tweets were remarking the pop stars death
- Michael Jackson is ranked on seven out of the daily top ten Twitter trend topics
- He is also ranked on four out of the top ten daily Google trend topics
All of this traffic and activity was enough to crash the social and entertainment sites.
The incident further highlights the internet’s ability to rapidly distribute breaking news far quicker than print media. Early editions of many UK newspapers such as The Independent, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and Metro missed publishing the story.
With that in mind it seems that the majority of people are turning to the web rather than the paper to get the full scope of breaking news.
This also supports Rupert Murdoch’s push to start charging users for access to press publications websites. The reasoning behind his proposal is that online Ad revenues are not corresponding with the amount of traffic the sites are receiving.