On January 18th, the Viral Ad Network will be supporting the fight against the SOPA and PIPA Bills in the USA, by running “Stop Censorship” ads to US viewers across much of our inventory.
This is part of internet-wide action against the bills coordinated for Jan 18th, and we are not being paid to run these ads.
For more information, visit americancensorship.org
Something of a Christmas tradition for me, I’ve been looking at our stats for world-wide Internet usage across the holidays and trying to make out what families are doing.
Here’s a sample of a chart I’ve been looking at, showing how many ads we were displaying per second over the festive period – you can ignore the different colours, they represent which datacentre ads were being displayed from.
And all through the house not a key was pressed, nor even a mouse [button].
Yup – Christmas Eve saw the majority of web traffic drop off far earlier than the rest of the year, as people got a good night’s sleep ready for the big day. (And countries who have their main celebration on Christmas Eve settled down after a long day). Traffic during the night (at local times) was approximately 30% lower than normal.
I for one was too busy putting the turkey in the oven and peeling veg to be surfing the net at the start of Christmas day – and with kids distracted by stockings and new toys, internet usage seems to have been focused in a much narrower period in the middle of the day.
This is different from the behaviour we used to see a few years ago, when there would be a large surge of traffic in the afternoon as people brought their new internet devices online. Perhaps the market in the countries we are focusing on is saturated enough that Christmas no longer brings so many new internet users.
Boxing day was the first day I had time to go online to catch up on emails etc – and it seems I was not alone. From early afternoon people came online in their masses – and many stayed there late into the night – making this boxing day come very close to being a record-breaking day for the Viral Ad Network – we served only 350K less ads on this Boxing day than on our highest day ever.
What was your internet usage like over Christmas? Did you spend Boxing day shopping online, talking to friends, or reading news sites? I’m interested in hearing – leave a comment below.
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