Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits

by Gio Gutierrez

MJ’s memorial service will no doubt go on as one of the most watched web events ever. Facebook, UStream, CNN, MySpace, Hulu and more offered live streams and here are the numbers.

CNN:
72 million page views
10.8 million unique visitors
8.9 million live video streams

Ustream:
4.6 million total streams
1.6 million total unique visitors
12,000 messages per minute sent through chat/Ustream’s Social Stream

Facebook:
733,000 status updates
759,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
6,000 updates/minute at the peak

E! Online:
9,000 status updates
87,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

ABC:
48,000 status updates
97,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

MTV:
5,000 status updates
21,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

Very impressive numbers to be sure, but they don’t surpass those of President Obama’s inauguration, which was the last web event to draw this much attention from the social web. During the inauguration, the CNN/Facebook live stream drew 13.9 million live streams between 6 AM and 11:45 AM ET, with millions more during the course of the day, and a peak of 1.3 million concurrent streams.