There has been much written about the impact that social media had in the government’s collapse in Egypt. I think you can debate both sides of that argument, but what I found most interesting about the uprising in Egypt was the role of Al Jazeera, especially here in the U.S., where it might have replaced CNN as the TV station of choice whenever something happens in the Middle East.
Techcrunch had some great data last week from Chartbeat that provided a realtime snapshot of what activity looked like on Al Jazeera’s English website on Friday when Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak resigned.
If you look at the pie chart in the lower keft-hand corner, you can see that traffic from social media (lavender) was about equal to traffic from search (green), but that is a normalized view over time.
When Al Jeeze posted the article “Hosni Mubarak resigns as president,” 71% of traffic at 11:40 AM ET came from social media.
The second screenshot below shows a bar chart that breaks up traffic by source across time, and shows how traffic from social media (also lavender) spiked across the site right around noon.
And what was the biggest source of social media traffic? It wasn’t Facebook. It was Twitter (followed by Reddit). When it comes to spreading realtime news, the source that people are turning too today is Twitter. Wonder what the BBC, CNN and the NY Times think of that?
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