Michael Jackson Online Mania ...

If your internet connection was slow yesterday between 12 noon and 4pm - these web statistics about the Michael Jackson Memorial Service might explain why. According to the NewTeeVee blog, this event was the second-largest day of online traffic, aside from the recent US Presidental Inauguration.

Here are the web stats:

Through to 5pm CNN.com had 81 million page views, 11.8 million unique visitors and 9.7 million live video streams.

MSNBC.com says that visitors watched 3 million live steams of Jackson's serivce and the site had more than 82 million page views and 7 million unique visitors as of 5pm yesterday.

There were a total of about 1 million users posting approximately 800,000 status updates on Facebook related to the live online broadcasts by CNN, E! Online, ABC and MTV of the Michael Jackson memorial service.

These statistics are excerpts from this NewTeeVee blog post.

I admit I was one of the guilty ones that happened to catch a little bit of the event online yesterday ... I just couldn't resist the hype!