Following the tragic death of Michael Jackson last night, UK Internet visits to his homepage increased 17 fold. Yesterday www.michaeljackson.com was the 9th most visited Music website in the UK, and the highest ranked artist homepage.
TMZ, the website that originally broke the story, picked up 1 in every 1,100 UK Internet visits yesterday, making it the 73rd most visited website overall. Given that the site usually ranks somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 in the UK, this was a 20-fold increase in visits.
Of course, the subject is dominating conversations on Twitter and – as the chart below illustrates – the micro-blogging service had its busiest every day in the UK yesterday. That the spike wasn’t quite as huge as may be expected is probably due to the fact that news broke so late UK time. Given the time difference, my guess is that my US colleagues will have some more representative stats that show the true impact later today.

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