The Royal Wedding Facts and Figures

How did you watch the Royal Wedding? There is obviously a good chance that you were one of the estimated 2 billion people (including 34 million Brits) who watched it on the telly, but there were plenty of other high tech options for feeling part of the day.

For example, YouTube had a special Royal Channel online showing the BBC pictures. Rather surprisingly it didn’t make it into the top 20 most visited sites of the day, with America’s Next Top Model among the numerous other channels finishing above it. Meanwhile, the YouTube site saw the Royal Wedding tag used 5,000 times in the week of the event.

The footage was also shown live on the BBC’s own site. Although official figures haven’t been released it is estimated that a good percentage of the 9 million visitors to the site were there to have a glimpse of William and Kate, and in fact the weight of traffic caused some temporary problems with the streaming service.

Twitter also saw a lot of Royal Wedding related trends on the go, with some of the day’s top ones being William and Kate, Westminster Abbey and RoyalWedding. We can add to that the 32,000 people who decided to follow the Royal Wedding account from NBC.

The people at Facebook have given us some of the best statistics for the build up to big day. For example, in the month before the wedding over 1.75 million comments were made including the words Royal Wedding.  During the period of the nuptials themselves 47 updates a second made mention of the wedding, while a page called “Princess Beatrice’s Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hat” quickly drummed up over 4,000 followers.

The overall web traffic situation is more difficult to get a good handle on, but there was certainly more activity than on other days, with an increase of almost 40% being reported by some sources. The UK also represented an 11% share of the overall web traffic on the day of the question, which is far higher than normal figures would be. It is estimated that at the highest point 5.3 million pages were being viewed, and it has been described as one of the top ten events in the history of the internet (provisionally ranked at number 6).

Finally, Yahoo reported a staggering increase of almost 1,200% regarding the question which obviously had many people scratching their heads; “What is Prince William’s last name?”

So now we can see how big an impact technology has on big events we can only wonder how many ways we will have to tune in the wedding of the first kid of William and Kate.