Royal Wedding Named Sixth-Biggest Internet Event Ever

World | April 29, 2011, Friday // 19:09|  views

ell wishers flock to Buckingham Palace in London, Britain 29 April 2011, to celebrate the Royal Wedding of Britain`s Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. Photo by EPA/BGNES

The wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton made it only to the sixth spot amid the top Web news events of all time, but managed to draw a record number of online viewers, data shows.

Global Internet traffic on news-focused websites peaked at 5.3 million page views per minute at about 13:30 a.m. GMT on Friday, according to Akamai, an Internet service provider and traffic monitor.

That makes the wedding the sixth biggest event in Internet history.

The ranking continues to be topped by a World Cup soccer match and the longest Wimbledon tennis match, which happened at the same time in June 2010. More than 10.3 million people per minute clicked on news stories about those sporting events.

Will and Kate did beat out President Obama's election in November 2008, which got 4.3 million page views per minute, Akamai says.

Of course, fewer people in general went to the Internet for news two years ago than do now, which makes these kinds of comparisons a bit tricky, said Jeff Young, a spokesman for Akamai.

The royals did better when it comes to live video.

The company Livestream, which provides live video services to the Associated Press, Entertainment Tonight, CBS and others, tells CNN partner site Mashable that it broke its all-time record for simultaneous live streams.

Some 300,000 people were watching the company's live video feed at 6 a.m. ET, Mashable says.

"Each year we are seeing more people consume video online at events of this nature, but it's very hard obviously to do that apples to apples comparison," Young said. How widely an event is syndicated greatly affects how many people will end up seeing it on the Internet, he said.

The interest in the royal wedding online does show how the Internet is changing the way people look for and consume information, he said.

"This is an example of just how important the Internet and connected devices have become to how people experience something like this," he said. "It wasn't the fact that people were at the office in front of their computers -- and yet still a huge number of folks have gone online to experience this event.

"That shows where we've moved as a society."

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Tags: Middleton, Catherine, William, prince, Prince William, Kate Middleton, married, wedding dress, Duchess of Cambridge

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