Friday, Jul. 03, 2009

3) This Was a Big Win for Social Media

Well, yes and no. Traffic spiked so hard on Twitter and Facebook that they nearly went down. But Twitter doesn't have ads, so the traffic doesn't translate into dollars. And Facebook became sluggish, frustrating its users and straining its resources. Meanwhile, over at the big media companies, TV ratings at the cable news channels were almost double what they usually are on a Thursday, and publishing companies rushed out tribute issues or stopped the presses to do new cover stories. One of those companies was, in fact, TIME. My sources there — er, here — say retailers are reporting the Jackson issue is selling briskly. It's a terribly insensitive observation, but nonetheless true, that in purely dollar terms, the big media companies will probably make more off of Jackson's death than the feisty little outfits that were first, or the social media sites that carried the wave of public mourning.