14 DAY TRIAL // The news of Osama bin Laden's death was a fairly typical big news event online, if you can call something in the fast changing ecosystem of the web 'typical.' It didn't manage to break any usage records, though it came close, but it did cause quite a lot of traffic to news sites as well as web traffic in general.
Twitter saw a rather big spike and Google Searches were monopolized by terms related to the event. And, of course, the 'bad guys, tried to capitalize on the global interest with spam, black hat SEO and other nasty things.
Traffic to news sites peaked at 4,1 million page views per minute, as measured by Akamai. That's a fairly large number close to some of the biggest ever seen, but not close enough to get into the top ten.
The timing of the event is what contributed most to it, Europe was just waking up while North America was going to sleep. With two of the biggest continents when it comes to web traffic and the ones most interested in the event during low traffic hours, the relatively small interest is understandable.
For comparison, the most popular news event ever generated 10 million page views per minute for Akamai sites, while the tenth most popular 4.6 million. Five of the most highly trafficked days were in 2011 and the rest in the top 10 in 2010.
Meanwhile, the story was mostly the same on Twitter. While the site saw an unusually high number of tweets per second, 4,000, it didn't come close to the record of 6,900 tweets per seconds set on New Year's Day.
As it has been the case for several years now, people turned to Google to get more info on the event and the site was prepared, since its indexing speed can keep up with ongoing events, and it also incorporates real time results.
Several hours after the event, most of the top 10 searches were related to the news. The query "osama bin laden dead" was labeled as volcanic by Google.