TMZ was the first to break the news about Michael Jackson’s death last Thursday and scooped all of the major news outlets. As a result, traffic to TMZ reached a 3 year high, with visits increasing 5x in volume from the previous day. The market share of visits increased 18% above the previous high on February 20, 2009, which took place after TMZ published photos of a bruised Rihanna following the assault by Chris Brown. TMZ was 60th among all websites on Thursday when ranked by the market share of visits, up from 305th on Wednesday, June 24th. The story also caused a surge of new visitors to TMZ, with 61% of the visits coming from new (defined as having not visiting the website in the past 30 days) visitors on the day of Jackson’s death, up from 19% the previous day.

While TMZ clearly had an advantage in being first to report the story, in comparison, the other news sources captured a higher share of visits than TMZ. On Thursday, the top 4 News & Media websites ranked by visits were Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC and Google News. MSNBC and CNN received the highest spike in visits from the previous day, increasing 67% and 64%, respectively.