The tragic death of Steve Irwin saw Australians and people from around the globe jump online yesterday with news.com.au reporting a 400% hike in traffic and ninemsn clocking up its biggest single online news day, topping the Beaconsfield mine rescue.
According to ninemsn, half of the page impressions across the ninemsn network yesterday were from people accessing stories and pictures about Steve Irwin.
The thirst for news on his death attracted 821,000 unique visitors to the site yesterday, beating the previous record set by the Beaconsfield miners on May 8, 2006.
Additionally, there have been 720,000 video streams, again beating the previous record set by the Beaconsfield miners’ rescue.
Ninemsn has also set up a Windows Live Space for people to leave their messages of condolences with almost 3600 messages left already at http://ninemsnyoursay.spaces.live.com.
“Australian’s have a great deal of affection for Steve Irwin which has been evident in the response to the news of his death yesterday,” ninemsn said.
“We see this as being part of a bigger trend where people are increasingly going online for breaking news events. We saw this with Schapelle Corby, the Beaconsfield miners, and yesterday with the news about Steve Irwin.
“Media habits are changing and each major news event we see more and more people choosing to get their news online.”
Meanwhile, News Interactive said traffic to its news.com.au site experienced a 400% hike yesterday compared to May 8, when the Beaconsfield rescue attracted a 40% jump in traffic.
Hitwise figures showed that Irwin’s official website, www.crocodilehunter.com, became the number one entertainment/personalities website amongst Australian users yesterday, jumping from 36th spot to the top spot on September 4.
In the US, the site jumped from 516thspot to become the third most popular online destination in the entertainment/personalities category.
