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By The Numbers: An Online Snapshot Of Bin Laden’s Demise

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Osama Bin Laden’s death Sunday evening drove people to the web to find out more, and top sites are now disclosing just how many people visited. Several claim traffic set new records. Some highlights below.

Twitter: Twitter says Bin Laden’s death drove “the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever” with more than 3,440 Tweets per second coming in between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. ET Sunday evening. Notably, there were no fail whales.

Yahoo: Searches for Bin Laden were up 100,000 percent on Sunday, the company says. Younger people seemed disproportionately likely to look up information about the terrorist.

CNN.com: CNN says traffic to its site was up 217 percent. CNN.com received 88 million page views between 10 p.m. ET Sunday and 1 p.m. ET Monday.

MSNBC.com: The site says it had its “second highest video day” surpassing the video traffic its Michael Jackson coverage received. As of 6 p.m. ET, it had served more than 21 million online video streams.

New York Times: The newspaper tells Romenesko that page views between 10 p.m. ET Sunday and 2 p.m. ET Monday were up 86 percent compared to the average traffic its site was getting on comparable days. That apparently was too much and there complaints of slowness.

Wall Street Journal: Visitors to WSJ.com were up 81 percent on Sunday evening, compared to prior weeks, the newspaper tells us. Page views were up 125 percent.

ABC News: ABC (NYSE: DIS) News says its digital properties had “the largest hour of traffic in its history” between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. ET Sunday and that today has been the “highest trafficked day in the history of the news site.” The company’s video of Bin Laden’s compound had been seen by 1 million people on the site as of this afternoon.

We’ll update this post as we get more numbers.

May 2, 2011 7:30 PM ET

Osama Bin Laden on newspaper Photo: Getty Images / Mario Tama


Posted In: Research & Metrics, Metrics, Research, Search, Social Media, Video, osama bin laden

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