We knew that Michael Jackson’s memorial service would be one of the biggest events in Internet history, and so far, the numbers are confirming it. We’ve learned that CNN.com’s live stream of the event drew at least 9.7 million views (through 5pm ET), with a maximum of 781,000 concurrent viewers.
While that falls short of the 27 million total and 1.3 million concurrent live streams that President Obama’s inauguration saw on CNN.com, it would appear that users were more engaged in the company’s Facebook Connect integration for Jackson, with upwards of 6,000 status updates being posted per minute earlier today. CNN also reports that their website has received 11.8 million unique visitors and 81 million page views so far today.
Elsewhere around the Web, Twitter is seeing massive volume of Jackson-related tweets. In addition to occupying all 10 of Twitter’s trending topics, we now know that the term “Michael Jackson” alone was generating 80,000 tweets per hour. Taking into account all of the other associated terms being used, the event likely rivals some of the most discussed events we’ve ever seen on Twitter, with the most recent example being the #iranelection.