It has been widely reported that Michael Jackson’s untimely death caused a flurry of online activity last week, downing Twitter, Wikipedia and TMZ and even causing problems for Google News. Searches for “michael jackson” ranked 7th among all search terms last week, accounting for one in every 500 US Internet searches.
The top websites receiving traffic from searches for “michael jackson” were Wikipedia, Google News and Michael Jackson’s own website. Taking a category level view, we see that News and Media sites were the biggest recipients of traffic at 18%, followed by Entertainment at 13%, Social Networks at 7% and Music at 6%.
The subject dominated conversations on Twitter, driving that site’s traffic to reach a new daily high with share of US Internet visits to Twitter.com reaching 0.24% of all US Internet visits, equivalent to 1 in every 417 US Internet visits (see chart below). Note that we are measuring web visits only, so this excludes mobile access and desktop applications. My colleague across the pond similarly reported that UK visits to Twitter reached an all time high last week.

Charles Arthur of guardian.co.uk asks an interesting question – “which messaging service did you hear about Michael Jackson’s death on? (Facebook, Twitter, Twitscoop…)” And contrast this to how you heard about Princess Diana’s death or that the Twin Towers had been hit by airplanes. A good follow up might be, where did you turn after hearing about his death and how has that changed?
On a separate note, Hitwise search data reveals what every Michael already knows. People don’t know how to spell “michael”. The #3 search term that included the word “jackson” last week was “micheal jackson”.