How many people have looked at the full, gruesome video of James Foley’s murder, or the pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and scores of other celebrities that were put online earlier this week?
The simple answer is: nobody knows. But you can make some estimates. And they run into millions. The murder of Foley was first posted to Google’s YouTube, and pictures from it to Twitter. Both organisations moved quickly to delete the full video (Google has allowed the video without its ending to remain online if it has “news context”) while Twitter suspended accounts that tweeted pictures as quickly as it could.
Neither organisation would say how many views were made, or accounts suspended.
However, given that Google handles about 6bn searches per day, one can guess at how many people are trying to look at something at any time based on data from Google Trends.
This doesn’t give absolute numbers for searches – only a relative value between 0 and 100. But we can use Facebook as a point of reference.
Surprising though it may sound, lots of people type “Facebook” into Google in order to go to the page. According to data collected by Hitwise in August, around 3.7% of traffic from Google goes to Facebook. Out of 6bn searches per day, that’s around 222 million people going to Facebook.
But many people will have searched for something else and ended up on Facebook. Let’s assume only 1 in 10 people actually Googled “Facebook” and followed the link there.
That means, on most days, 22 million people type “Facebook” and go to Facebook. But in Google Trends, that search unhelpfully dwarfs almost all others. Luckily, “Google” is also a popular search, getting about 40% as many as “Facebook”; so 8.9m per day.
Now we can make some estimates. On 20 August, the day after IS released its gruesome video, for every 95 searches for “google” there were 11 for “james foley”, and two for “james foley video”.
Assume all of those sought out the video and you get 1.2m views. Assume only those searching with “james foley video” viewed it and the figure is 190,000.
How about Jennier Lawrence? Searches for her rocketed by a factor of 50 on Monday, when the Google: “Jennifer Lawrence” search ratio was 92:7 – which suggests, on the basis of 8.9m “Google” searches, that 700,000 people suddenly sought out Jennifer Lawrence. (There aren’t any appreciable searches for “Jennifer Lawrence pics”, “J-Law pics”, “Jlaw pics” or similar.)
Remember, though, we made the assumption that only 1 in 10 Facebook visits came from a search for “Facebook”. Take that away, and it would mean between 1.9m and 12m views of the James Foley killing, and 7m views of Jennifer Lawrence pictures. The latter doesn’t include those who might have looked at them on file-sharing sites or 4chan – but the number of users there is comparatively small compared to the 2.7 billion on the whole internet.
