Message from Michael - June 29 - Michael Jackson

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        June 29, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS YOUR FIGHT

      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS MEDIA’S FIGHT

      INTERNET YOUNGER THAN MICHAEL JACKSON

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK

      SCARY FACTOID OF THE WEEK

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – FAKE NEWS

 

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      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS YOUR FIGHT:  Well, if you’re Michael Jackson, it’s pretty funky strong.  You already know that his album Thriller is the highest selling album in history with more than 50 Million sold.  And that funky strength continues after his death.  On YouTube alone, Thriller has been viewed more than 41 Million times since his death.  In descending order, followed by Beat It, with 27M, Dangerous with 16.5M and Billie Jean with 15M.  On iTunes, the music video version of Thriller was the top seller, but that’s the least of it. Eight out of the top ten selling albums were Jackson’s, 17 out of the top 20 CD’s were Jackson’s.  At Amazon, ten of the top 25 albums downloaded were Jackson’s and the day after his death, Jackson’s songs accounted for 60% of ALL music sales at the site.   At Google, Thriller recorded more than 32 Million searches, but there were 45 Million searches for Michael Jackson T-Shirts.   At CNN.com the hits were five times the normal traffic with 20 Million visitors; the same five-fold increase for CBSNews.com. It was the same story for all news websites; even CNet News doubled its traffic during that time. 

So the next question is how funky strong was the fight by media, and particularly the Internet, to stay up during this onslaught.  Well, all that traffic meant that the Internet stumbled… a lot… but despite a CNN headline “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him,” it didn’t quite fall.  AOL’s Instant Messaging service went down for 40 minutes.  At Wikipedia, the overload resulted in what a spokesman called “some fluttering” of access but which others called a slowdown, almost to stop.  Google also had its fluttering moment, with a kind of self-inflicted slow down in use because the service interpreted the massive surge in searches as an attack and started putting out error messages.    Of course, Twitter had similar slowdowns when, at several points, tweets about Jackson comprised almost a third (30%) of all tweets.  Digital media measurement service Keynote says its original assessment that news sites were overwhelmed was in error and that while there were significant slowdowns, there wasn’t the stoppage initially indicated.  However, the impact still can not be underestimated.  Internet backbone provider Akamai reported that Internet traffic WORLDWIDE jumped 11% the day Jackson died.

But all of this still means Michael Jackson continues to set records.  Yahoo says its News property set an all-time record for traffic after Jackson’s death with 16.4 Million unique visitors.  As social media website guide Mashable noted, that’s a million more visits than the Yahoo news site had on election day.  The Wikipedia website scored the highest traffic in the eight year history of the site with a Million visitors in the 7 p.m. hour alone and 1.8 Million that Thursday evening.  Again, for comparison purposes, New York Times media blog site Decoder notes that President Barack Obama got 2.3 Million Wikipedia site visits on election day.  Consumer adviser Regina Lewis at AOL, quoted in the earlier CNN story, says the Jackson story may prove a ‘seminal’ moment in Internet history because of the scope and depth of the onslaught.  AOL adviser Lewis also believes Jackson’s death could prove a “historic milestone” for Mobile Internet traffic in particular because of the sheer amount and when it occurred – while people were at work.

As a side note, I would remind readers that in last week’s MfM, Internet backbone provider Cisco predicted that Internet traffic would increase five times over the next four years and that video would account for 90% of that traffic by then.   Further, proof that one man’s death is another man’s con opportunity, anti-website Sophos reports that spammers took advantage of the Jackson death to find potential email victims… sending out spam emails disguised as news about Jackson’s death looking for people who respond, therefore verifying that they are legitimate email addresses and potential spam victims.  Another side note, news organizations are also dealing with fallout from the Michael Jackson death, aside from the impact on their websites.  That is the fact that celebrity gossip site TMZ was the first to break the news.  Interestingly, TMZ’s site CNN.com did not initially go with the TMZ report even though the two sites are co-owned by Time Warner.  And, finally, I have to say I have no idea what the line means --  “showing how funky strong is your fight” which is from Michael Jackson’s Beat It.                   

      INTERNET YOUNGER THAN MICHAEL JACKSON:  All right, that’s kind of a funky headline, but it is interesting --  from both perspectives when you think about it.  In 1969 when the military put Arpanet out to bid (thus creating the first computer network and the precursor to the Internet), Michael Jackson was 11 years old, a part of The Jackson Five, and had just signed a contract with Motown Records.  This isn’t some random thought that I came up with out of the blue.  The Open University based in the U.K. has put out a series of podcast interviews with pioneers like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners Lee and others commemorating the fact.

      THE BATTLE OF THE BROWSERS:  First Microsoft released IE8, Internet Explorer version 8, earlier this year.  Then Apple released version 4.0 of its Safari browser.  Now Mozilla is releasing version 3.5 of its Firefox browser.  More critically, underlying those new releases is something called HTML 5, which Safari has some of, but Firefox has more of.  As I’m sure most of you know, HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language and is the language which allows web pages to talk to each other.  To hear some sites describe it, HTML 5 is the evolutionary equivalent of man walking upright or developing opposable thumbs.  Website BNET Technology says HTML 5 will transform IT “more profoundly than any development since the Internet.”  (Another reason why I recalled the birth of the Internet above.)  It sounds like one of those snake oil ads that claims to do everything, but according to BNET, HTML 5 allows the Web to become a universal operating system, making mobile devices more powerful than low end laptops, improves the quality of cloud-based applications, the efficiency of device storage, and could even be the “ultimate in disintermediation” by allowing every day people to collaborate in the Ethernet without big-time applications like Google or big-time companies like IBM.  I’m not sure whether to say “whew” or “wow.”  And, yes, I admit this may seem a little too techie for most of us, but this is the stuff that you will be hearing about and dealing with in the future.      

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK:  There are more than 150 BILLION web pages stored on the Internet Archive (archive.org) website.  Doing a little simple math, that is 25 websites for every single one of the 6 Billion men, women and children inhabiting this planet.  If you go just on the basis of people with Internet access (which, according to Internet World Statistics, numbers roughly 1.6 Billion), that’s almost 100 websites for every single person online.  And that is not the total number of websites. The archive site ‘only’ lists all websites from 1996 to just a few months ago.

      SCARY FACTOID OF THE WEEK:  At least if you are in television, it is.  TV shows online are commanding higher CPM’s than Broadcast TV shows, according to a report carried by Bloomberg TV and attributed to “global wealth management” firm Sanford C. Bernstein.  Candidly this would have been the headline for this week’s MfM if it hadn’t been for Michael Jackson’s death.  Before you dismiss it, the Bloomberg report quotes a stalwart of traditional media, David Poltrack, who heads research for CBS.  Even he admits that sites like HULU.com and TV.com provide advertisers a captive audience that has fewer commercials and higher viewer recall.  The Bloomberg report says, for example, that a prime time TV ad for The Simpsons would normally run $20 to $40 per thousand viewers.  On HULU, that same ad would for $60 per thousand viewers.  The Bernstein analyst cited in the report, Michael Nathanson, noted that a Simpson’s episode on HULU only has 37 seconds of ad space compared to the nine minutes in the broadcast version.  He also warned the networks not to “cannibalize their core business” in moving to the Web.  (As I say, I am surprised this hasn’t gotten more coverage.  It may be, I should note by way of balance, that the report runs counter to many other articles I’ve read about the abundance of ad space on the Internet.  I guess it depends on what the content is and what the delivery system is.)

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  We hinted at this in the section above about news organizations questioning the credibility of TMZ, but during the furor over Michael Jackson’s death, several websites and bloggers carried stories that actor Jeff Goldblum and then actor Harrison Ford also had died.  Apparently the rumors grew out of websites which allow you to fabricate reports using real news report by simply inserting a name.  Enough so-called ‘legitimate’ news operations carried the story, forcing Goldblum’s publicist to issue a statement that Goldblum was alive and well and living in Los Angeles.  As long as we’re on the subject of ‘fake news,’ the best example of all had to be the story out of Bolivia where a TV newscast aired images from the television series Lost, believing for some unknown reason that the footage was from the Air France plane crash.  Finally, as a footnote to all this, the Federal Trade Commission (the same people who want to hold public hearings on the future of news), wants rules to regulate bloggers. First off, they want bloggers to disclose when content is sponsored by advertisers.  The agency also wants bloggers and review sites to be held liable for consumer injuries resulting from unsubstantiated claims.  This follows the growing interest in review sites online, and follows in the wake of a number of businesses masquerading their pitches as blog comments.          

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