Maybe we’re complete data geeks, but as we evacuated Comscore’s headquarters in Reston, Virginia, a mere 72 miles from the epicenter of the largest earthquake to hit the region in 67 years, the first thing on our minds was wanting to understand the quake’s quantifiable impact on Internet usage.
Throughout the densely-populated and Internet-savvy east coast of the U.S., where the majority of the population has never experienced an earthquake of such magnitude, people flocked to their computers and mobile devices for breaking news of the event. Social media like Facebook and Twitter also played a key role in amplifying the news, which reverberated across the web. While this was happening, Comscore’s servers were up and monitoring Internet usage volumes, second-by-second.
Upon re-entering the office following our evacuation, we immediately kicked off a number of scripts to begin aggregating the Internet usage data into usable insights. As we brainstormed, we came up with our newest Comscore creation – the “Internet Seismometer” – which is an animated look at U.S. Internet usage by minute between the hours of 1:40pm and 3pm yesterday – for computer vs. mobile-based traffic:
The following timeline highlights what you just witnessed in that video, and the number of immediately-noticeable findings we culled from the data:
So, what do these findings tell us about ourselves as members of an Internet-dependent culture? I think there are several key takeaways:
None of these principles are new. We’ve seen other demonstrations of the Internet’s power recently with events such as the Libyan revolution, Osama Bin Laden’s death, and the Japanese crisis. Thankfully, this latest mass-event left substantially less damage in its wake, but what it did leave was definitive and quantifiable evidence within Comscore's data of just how powerful and influential the Internet really is.