The 15 minutes of fame in online. Globally.
Or, whatever, those 15 minutes of fame could as well last for a few days .
1. So, Wednesday evening, PROTV uploads on their website the material filmed by their cameraman in the Himalayas, showing the Chinese Army assassinating Tibetans.
2. On Saturday I take a glance on the website and I see that protv.ro doesn’t do too well in traffic. Robi (the coordinator of the online division of Mediafax’s televisions) tells me that this happens because that film is linked on onet.pl - the biggest Polish portal - and that creates a super-spike in traffic.
3. The guys from PRO’s IT team move fast and add capacity/servers. So do the site’s editors who add in a few hours an English version of the materials (here and here).
4. The website’s traffic goes way up (at a moment I saw that it had the biggest number of visitors in the last 24 hours, after Softpedia). And notice that most of the visitors came for the movie, so it was a big band consumption.
5. Today I see in GoogleNews a huge cluster (over 100 articles) about the cameraman who filmed the Tibetans’ executions. With apparitions in digg.com, boingboing.net, International Herald Tribune, News Corp, Guardian, CBS News etc.
And now my remarks:
1. Onet.pl is listed in Warsaw’s stock. With a capital of 1.2 billion zlotys and sells of 85 million zlotys in 2005. This means $400 millions and $29 millions. Onet.pl send in an interval smaller than 24 hours, yesterday, over 79 thousands units. With an article that appeared in one category of the news portal. The normal question is this: what traffic do they have?
I feel that it is at least 15-20 times over the one of Romanian portals, otherwise it is not explainable how they sent so many visitors.
2. Here’s an example of Press 2.0. I mean the way they link to blogs and other external sources.
3. It is important to have the hardware resources to deal with this kind of spike in traffic.
4. I am curious if CNN will cover the news. And the Western authorities. At the time being, they kind of need China’s vote regarding the North Korea and my feeling is they would not want to alienate the Chinese with this story. But to remain optimistic.
5. Compare the coverage in the traditional media with the one from digg.com. Which manages to generate a big quantity of comments and reactions.
6. I wonder how much this piece of news will go up. I mean, a few days have passed since an outside big channel covered it (Onet.pl) and after that a few hours until the international English publications/channels took it.
Later update (October 16): Mihai from PROTV offers here technical details. 2100 Gigabytes in 10 hours is something!