Akamai: Traffic to media websites surged on earthquake news

By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff

Traffic to news websites serviced by Akamai Technologies Inc. surged 25 percent above normal levels shortly after media outlets began issuing reports that an earthquake centered in Virginia had shaken the Eastern Seaboard, Cambridge-based Akamai said today.

Web traffic by Akami

Chart below shows the number of page views that readers of news sites serviced by Akamai consumed over time.

Akamai is an Internet data delivery company, and it provides service to more than 200 news outlets around the globe, including Reuters, the BBC, and The New York Times Co., which owns The Globe and Boston.com.

Akamai maintains an index that monitors global news consumption on the websites of its media customers. The index is based on total page views per minute by people visiting the websites of Akamai’s news media customers.

At 2 p.m., or shortly before news of the earthquake broke, Akamai’s index was registering about 2 million page views per minute, a company spokesman said. A short time later, as news of the earthquake spread, traffic peaked at just over 3.3 million page views per minute worldwide. Traffic for a normal Tuesday registers in the 2.78 million page views per minute range, Akamai said.

Still, today’s numbers were nowhere near a record. Sporting events of worldwide interest tend to generate the most traffic. In June 2010, the World Cup tournament in soccer was unfolding at the same time as a dramatic tennis match was being played at Wimbledon. The result was an Akamai record of nearly 10.4 million page views per minute.

Live coverage of the royal wedding in April generated nearly 5.4 million page views per minute, Akamai said.