• Royal Wedding Viewed More Than 100M Times On YouTube

    Alexia Tsotsis

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Friday, May 6th, 2011

    The story of tech is largely about adoption, and adoption often comes into focus in the wake of cultural events. Last Friday’s wedding of Prince William to Katharine Middleton was the epitome of an event, bringing together YouTube watchers, Facebookers, Flickrers, Twitterers and even Colorers in a mass collective online experience of the festivities.

    Taking place at 11 am in London (4 am in SF) the wedding itself was live streamed 72 million times, to people watching in 188 countries. With the addition of rebroadcasts that day, the streams reached 101 million by the end of April 29th.

    (In case you missed it you can still view the entire 3 hour and 37 minute long affair on YouTube or above.)

    During the 10 second Royal kiss, the Royal YouTube Channel received 100K additional requests, at 10K requests a second. Unsurprisingly the top five countries watching the spectacle were the UK, the US, Italy, Germany and France.

    The official Royal Wedding website was bombarded with traffic, and has seen around 37.7 million page views and 13.7 million unique visitors since its launch on March 2. The event has also spawned the already beloved memes Frowning Flower Girl, Cartwheeling Priest and Princess Beatrice’s Hat.

    Princess Beatrice’s ridiculous hat has over 100K fans on Facebook, beating Aretha Franklin’s inauguration hat at 94K. But seriously, what were they both thinking?

    Company: YouTube
    Website: youtube.com
    Launch Date: February 2005
    Funding: $11.5M

    YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

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