Web traffic surge after Michael Jackson’s death

THE death of pop superstar Michael Jackson has led to a massive surge in web traffic and is dominating discussion on social networking sites.

Major websites including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace were reported “moving at a snail’s pace” today as millions of people went online to read about Jackson’s death.

By 11am this morning news.com.au had seen more than twice as many visitors as it usually does in a full day.

Four of the ten most popular stories on the site this morning were about Jackson.

Other News Limited sites including The Courier-Mail and Herald Sun also saw a spike in traffic.

Of the others, one was about Farrah Fawcett, who today succumbed to a battle with cancer, and one was a report on Patrick Swayze’s struggle with the same disease.

On Twitter, five of the ten trending topics were concerned with the pop star’s death, including “Rip MJ”, “#MichaelJackson” and “Thriller”.

Messages containing the word “Jackson” were still being posted to the site at a rate of almost 900 per minute hours after news of his death broke. It was earlier reported they were moving in the tens of thousands per minute.

According to a report on Mashable, tribute posts accounted for almost a third of all messages on the site at their peak.

A search on Google for blog posts mentioning “Michael Jackson” in the last 12 hours returned more than 50,000 results.

Almost all of the most popular keywords on Google this morning were in reference to Jackson’s death.

The exception was the name of Jeff Goldblum, after a hoax reporting his death made its way around the web.

As well as on news.com.au, Jackson’s death was the most popular story on the sites of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the ABC, SBS and NineMSN.

The only major news site to buck the trend was Melbourne’s The Age, where it was the second most-read story.

The first was a report on the city’s new public transport operators.