The Michael Jackson effect

At last year’s National Library Christmas party, staff performed their own take on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The performance was placed on YouTube and had great success. With the recent death of Michael Jackson I thought it would be interesting to show what has happened to the traffic of the performance over the past week. Here is a graph showing the traffic for the past month. It’s gone from 20 or 30 views a day to a spike of well over 1000 views as people went to YoutTube searching for Michael Jackson video clips. The majority of these views came from people searching YouTube for “Thriller”.

Chart showing the spike in views to the video at YouTube

It’s interesting to compare this to many of our own search services that saw no spike in people looking for Michael Jackson related material. The service that should be the most obvious place for people to search, Music Australia, received only 2 searches for Michael Jackson. Although this is primarily a service relating to Australian music and musicians, we generally see many search queries for overseas artists occurring.

Now this starts to paint a pretty bad picture: YouTube = lots, Library = little. YouTube truly is a global website, while the National Library of Australia focuses on Australian content. Let’s see what the usage patterns to YouTube were for visitors just from Australia.

thriller-views-australia

There is a spike, but it’s relatively insignificant compared to the overall figures we saw earlier. Most of the traffic that made up the spike was from the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France and the UK. Very little of it was from Australia.

So should we be reacting to international events like this and actively promoting whatever resources we have available on our website (however limited they may be) or can’t we compete with the likes of Google and YouTube with their global reach and the surge of traffic they get when users are desperate for information? We can’t compete with them on the “up to the minute” news, but we should be able to provide pathways to the resources we have. If we do provide them, will people come?

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One Response to “The Michael Jackson effect”

  1. [...] that are worth subscribing to. In particular, that National Library of Australia discusses the ‘Michael Jackson Effect’ in its Library labs Blog. It focuses on the same questions discussed in last week’s CAN [...]

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