After three nights of unrest in London and other cities, the UK Internet population has been tracking the progress of the London riots by visiting News and Media sites and Twitter.

The News and Media category saw its highest spike in visits so far this year, with a 14% increase in UK Internet visits between Monday 7 August and Tuesday 8 August.

Within the News and Media category, the BBC has been the biggest recipient of traffic, with a third of all visits either going to the BBC Homepage or the BBC News website. Sky News was the next biggest recipient, with 7% of all visits to the category. Interestingly, looking at the fastest moving search terms between Sunday 6 August and Monday 7 August, Sky News has seen a greater uplift in searches than the BBC. As the chart below illustrates, the third fastest moving term was “mark duggan”, the man who’s death was one of the catalysts for the initial unrest in Tottenham, north London.

The search data is corroborated by the visit data in the chart below. Although visits to the BBC News site are nearly three times as high as visits to the Sky News website, the BBC saw a weekly uplift in traffic of 68% because of the rioting, whereas Sky News’ uplift was 240%.

Although people were glued to the news sites for updates on the unrest, it was Twitter which has benefited the most from traffic as a result of the unrest in London. The real-time sharing of information through Twitter has made the platform the ideal discussion platform to spread updates on major news events like the riots, and yesterday (8 August) was Twitter’s biggest ever spike in UK traffic online.

Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday; by our estimations there were over 3.4 million visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone. To put that in context, Twitter received 15% more visits yesterday than it did around the super-injunctions scandal, the previous biggest spike in its UK history.
Somewhat unusually, the spike in traffic to Twitter was not repeated on other social media websites, especially Facebook. Looking at our postcode data helps to explain why this might be. Twitter is used widely across the UK but the most prolific Twitter users are located in London postcodes.

From the chart above you can see that five of the top 10 postcodes which over-index for Twitter usage are in London, including Enfield where the unrest started on Sunday. Internet users in the South East of London are 26% more likely to visit Twitter than the average member of the UK Internet population. By comparison, Facebook over-indexes in Northern cities such as Hull, Manchester, Doncaster and Blackburn. The London skew of Twitter users is a strong indicator why Twitter was the preferred social platform to share news on the riots and hence why it received its biggest ever traffic spike.
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