When the news about Michael Jackson’s death broke out, it was TMZ who scooped it beating other news outlets and was quoted as a source throughout Twitter, Facebook, traditional media and various online properties.
As a result, Hitwise numbers are showing that TMZ’s site traffic on that day was able to achieve a 3 year all-time high. The news created a spike and brought a 5x increase in volume as compared to the previous day’s site traffic.The incident even surpassed the 18% market share of TMZ site visits when it featured photos of controversial singer Rihanna badly beaten and bruised. Overall, TMZ became the 60th most visited site on the day of Michael Jackson’s death. A day before that event, TMZ’s site visit was ranked 305th in terms of market share.
But perhaps the best result that came out from this incident was the fact that it gave TMZ around 61% new unique visitors.
From an SEO perspective, the blog post that broke the news has over 12,000 incoming links. I wonder how TMZ will be taking advantage of that link equity?
Right after other “established” news sources beat TMZ in page visits. Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC, and Google all received some good spike in terms of site visits from fans and onlookers wanting to find the latest development in the cause of death of MJ. Both MSNBC and CNN got the highest page visits on Thursday, registering 67% and 64% increase respectively.
And that goes to show our dear readers the importance of being the first to report any controversial item on the Internet – be it in the form of news or blog posts.
