William and Kate attract some 400 million YouTube viewers

by Steven Mostyn - May 5 2011, 19:52

William and Catherine are no Charles and Diana, we said. No one will care, we claimed. The streets of London will be deserted, we predicted. The Internet will be unaffected, we posited. Cynicism be damned.

So, as the newly appointed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge emerged from Westminster Abbey to meet the applause of great sways of cheering royalists—and we here at The Tech Herald conceded defeat and wiped away a tear—we wondered if the Net was holding up beneath the strain.

Evidently, the world’s online infrastructure didn’t quite collapse. However, some 400 million viewers around the world tuned into the glitzy royal nuptials via YouTube’s dedicated Royal Channel.

Similarly, Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. said the wedding of the century helped drive some 400 million page views to Yahoo's online properties, the equivalent of some 50,000 requests per second.

And, adding to that, Internet traffic specialist Akamai has reported that a further three million people simultaneously streamed the high-profile event, beating the previous record of 1.6 million established during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Although general opinion suggested a sense of public apathy ahead of the April 29 wedding, it’s perhaps worth noting that Twitter registered more than two million tweets connected to the event during the week before William and Kate became the world’s most famous royal couple.

And the great unwashed were certainly out in force too, with more than a million people taking to the streets of London to revel in the festivities… no doubt fuelled by the generous day’s holiday afforded them by the UK government.

Cynical to the end, will we never learn?

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