MSN gets record traffic during Jackson memorial

MSN.com announced it received record-setting viewership during Michael Jackson's memorial Tuesday.

According to a site spokesperson, MSN.com received its biggest traffic spike ever during the Jackson event, with 50% more people watching the memorial than watched Barack Obama's inauguration.

The site -- one of many news outlets providing a live stream of the Staples Center ceremony (live blog here) -- delivered more than 3 million streams.

On CNN.com, however, the event was the second-largest live video streaming day in the site's history. The network reported  81 million pageviews and 9.7 million live video streams between 12 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET -- which included the entire memorial service. The news site's all-time viewership record for a full day was nearly 27 million video streams on President Obama's inauguration day. (Such numbers point out the trickiness of comparing the relative Web popularity of two different events -- where you set the start-and-stop parameters can make all the difference.)

A spokesperson for Akamai, a company that handles Internet traffic for a large number of outlets, also said the Jackson memorial was the second-largest online traffic surge of all time.

And if measuring only across Akamai's news sites, Jackson's memorial ranking falls further. Akamai registered a peak rate of 3.9 million global Internet visitors per minute around noon, which failed to crack the service's top 15 events in that particular measurement.

One traffic-watcher reported how Akamai's tracking rose and fell during various memorial speakers, providing real-time ratings of a sort:

Celebrities from the entertainment world were clearly the draw during the Webcast: Akamai's real-time video-stream count slumped slightly when the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage (OK, he's a fiery orator, but can he sing?), then rebounded when singer/songwriter/guitarist John Mayer took his place. The ups and downs could serve as an instant rating service for a particular star's appeal. (Sharpton at -20 per second, Mayer at +40. Brooke Shields started out at +10 but fell to -20 as her tribute went on. Martin Luther King III came in at -80.)