The Day Michael Jackson – and Nearly the Internet – Died

Yesterday the world lost an icon in the passing of Michael Jackson. The whole world watched as news broke over various online resources – and the King of Pop nearly took the Internet with him. As Brian Stelter reported this morning on New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, the news of Jackson’s death produced a surge in web traffic of epic proportions. Numerous news sites and social media outlets experienced record numbers yesterday, and saw functionality problems as a result.

Here’s a brief look at this historic day for the Internet and its most popular sites:

• GOOGLE: Google trends categorized the search term "michael jackson died" as 'Volcanic' yesterday, clearly spiking at 3 PM PDT and by far outpacing other search terms. Eight out of the top twenty hottest searches yesterday were about Michael Jackson. Just for comparison, on the day of the 2008 presidential election, only 6 of the hottest searches referred to Barack Obama. When the news about Jackson first broke, Google thought is was under attack.

• TWITTER: Twitter was especially rocking, with thousands of tweets per minute and speculation of Michael Jackson’s death coming around 5 or 6 p.m. ET. Twitter trend-tracking service Twist estimated that, at the peak yesterday afternoon, more than 20% of all tweets mentioned Michael Jackson. In the last 24 hours there have been over 210,000 tweets about Jackson’s death.  To put this in perspective, we looked at four key discussion threads on Twitter over a variety of relevant time periods:
  
  • 24 HOURS: In the last 24 hours there have been over 210,000 tweets about Michael Jackson.  To our knowledge, there has not been another issue that spiked this much and this fast in the history of Twitter, with the possible exception, perhaps, of Obama’s victory on November 4th, 2008. Obama’s gaffe about the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show in March of this year received just over 10,000 tweets in a 24 hour period.  Tweets about Michael Jackson’s death outpaced this by nearly a 21:1 ratio.
  • ONE WEEK: Discussion on Twitter about Mark Sanford in the last week has generated just over 18,600 tweets. 
  • ONE MONTH: The term “Iran” has been tweeted 133,000 times and the trending hashtag #iranelection received around 107,000 tweets in the last month (approximately 29 more days worth of tweeting than the news of Michael Jackson’s death has had to date).  At an average of 4,300 per day, tweets about Iran are outpaced by Michael Jackson tweets by nearly a 50:1 ratio.
  • ONE MONTH: It took just under one month of tweeting for there to be as many tweets about the iPhone as there were about Michael Jackson’s death in just a single 24 hour period.  In the past month, there have been just over 225,000 tweets about the iPhone.

• WIKIPEDIA: Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia article received 1.8 million visits on June 25, way up from an average of approximately 20,000 visits per day. Meanwhile, Wikipedians were hard at work behind the scenes, logging more than 650 individual edits to the article since news first broke that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital.

Given Thriller’s unrivaled status as the bestselling album of all-time – yesterday it was the top album on iTunes – there is little doubt that Jackson's music will live on in the digital world. But we now know that yesterday was a landmark day for the Internet that will live on in history as well.