Just as official pictures of the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton were released, it has been revealed that the wedding occasion made history as the sixth biggest online event ever. The event, which was watched on TV by over 24 million viewers in the United Kingdom and over 1 billion worldwide audience, was very popular on the Internet particularly on social media sites such as Facebook which recorded around 74 updates per second. In addition, Twitter recorded 67 royal wedding tweets per second at its peak with several users sending congratulatory messages to the royal couple via the popular micro-blogging site.
According to Web traffic monitor, Akamai, global news traffic peaked at 5.3 million page views per minute. While the figures also showed trending topics on the likes of Facebook and Twitter were dominated by the wedding although the event failed to surpass several major sporting events at its peak. Some of the most popular keywords used included “Westminster Abbey”, “Prince William”, and “Kate Middleton” as shown below.
Global Trending Topics On Twitter
- RoyalWedding
- #rw11
- casamentoreal (Spanish for Royal wedding)
- QILF
- William and Kate
- Sarah Burton (dress designer)
- Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco)
- Westminster Abbey
- Rutter (John Rutter – composer of “This is the day which the Lord hath made”)
- Anglican
Facebook Statistics
Figures from the world’s most popular social-networking site showed 684,399 status updates mentioned the royal wedding over a four hour period while 2,274 users checked-in at Westminster Abbey via Facebook’s “Places” feature.
Official Royal Wedding Pictures (Click to enlarge)
Furthermore, Clarence House released the official Royal Wedding album that shows the new bride and groom in the throne room at Buckingham Palace. The traditional wedding day photo album of the newly-titled Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was taken by Hugo Burnand.
