A look at how Covid-19 is impacting worldwide internet traffic on media sites and channels

By Zheng Ding, Senior Data Scientist at Akamai Technologies

After the WHO declared the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, many governments had declared national emergencies and implemented most strict lockdown procedures since decades ago. People are forced into social distancing, stay indoors and work from home, so that this pandemic is not only massively impacting the business of physical stores, but also changing our online behaviours. 

What Covid-19 has changed in streaming media and digital publishing

Not surprisingly, the traffic on media sites and channels has been significantly impacted by the social distancing guidelines and stay at home orders. As we compare the overall daily traffic on media sites with average page views, we can see that the daily traffic has been persistently surpassing the year-to-date daily average.

The media industry as a whole gained much more traffic in the past few weeks. But not all media sites are sharing this situation. The daily traffic from Mid-March to Mid-April attracted 35.5% more daily traffic: Video media traffic increased by 49.6%, while other digital media such as publishing also saw 28.4% more page views.Interestingly, our Digital Media customers were seeing increased traffic a week before Video Media. When Italy announced its national-wide lockdown and WHO classified COVID-19 as pandemic, many parts of the world finally started to take this pandemic seriously, and people visited news sites more frequently for information and updates.

But there is one sector that has been hit massively by the restrictions and is now struggling: Sports. The daily traffic is steadily decreasing since the recent peak day on March 9 when multiple baseball and basketball games in the United States happened on that Monday. After many league games got cancelled or suspended, the traffic of sport sites was dropped up to 82% from the February daily average. As news media traffic increased by 45.3%, traditional sport media traffic decreased by -69.4%.

Unprecedented traffic scale will happen during unprecedented times like this. While people are practicing social distancing and reducing physical activities, keeping the sites in high availability and responsiveness is critical to the continuity of global business.

NOTICE: 

All data was collected by Akamai Technologies from Jan 1, 2020 to April 15, 2020 using mPulse. mPulse combines real-time analytics with real user measurement beacons for web sites and native apps in iOS.