We saw how media attention drove Twitter’s share of searchers on the Iran Election to record heights two weeks ago. A barrage of mainstream media and blogosphere chatter swarmed the digerati’s collective consciousness, fusing their favorite techno-democratic phenom with Iranian political discontent.

Then the white glove dropped. MJ’s passing sent a megaton shock through the worldwide pop firmament of Planet Earth, rousing memories of Thriller from billions, even the Haters.

The web was not spared. Visitors shattered records Yahoo! News. Tweets swarmed across Twitter. Video streams flooded the online channels CNN and MTV. And updates exploded at Facebook. As CNN reported, “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.”

Michael told the Iran Election to Beat It. Over 24 times more searchers hit top search engines, news sites like CNN and the New York Times and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on Jackson’s death than on the Iranian election shenanigans.

Where did MJ searchers go? Google. The King of Pop gave back the King of Search its crown.

But the royal succession was not without a few princely hiccups. Twitter disabled the search box and Trending Topics sidebar on profile pages for 4 hours following the “avalanche” of tweets after MJ’s death. And Google blocked MJ searches for 25 minutes, mistaking the incoming torrent as an internationally coordinated cyber-attack of zombie bots.

Fans surged to music, video and retail sites to rekindle memories of his hit songs and music videos to bid farewell to the King of Pop. Yahoo! Music led the way with 45% share of visitors, and YouTube delivered a respectable 23% share.

Meanwhile Michael was still shattering music sales records mors immatura.

They say things come in threes, but I don’t think anyone expected the final glove to fall with such shocking news. Last week’s trio of celebrity death’s started with TV Icon, Ed McMahon (86), Super Model, Farrah Fawcett (62), and ended with the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson (51). Sure, the passing of Mr. McMahon and Ms. Fawcett was given main stream media attention. However, MJ’s death caused an online traffic frenzy of record breaking proportions.

How many people hit the web to get the skinny on MJ? Millions would be a conservative estimate. In fact, Yahoo! News set an all time record of 16.4 million UVs (unique visitors) on Thursday. Celebrity gossip site, tmz.com, received so much traffic that their servers reportedly crashed multiple times. Google was also a victim as the New York Post reported that Google News had to actually block the term “Michael Jackson” to prevent their site from crashing.

Using Compete’s daily online traffic metrics, reach and attention, we’re able to get a real sense of just how many online users in the US were surfing celebrity gossip sites to get their MJ updates.

Reach lets us to see what percentage of U.S. Internet users online visited a particular website on a particular day. Tmz.com, who broke the story of MJ’s death, reached 1.9% of the total US online population on 6/25. That’s a 438% increase from 6/24 and a 527% increase year over year. Other celebrity news sites experienced the same trend – eonline.com (up 213% to 1.3% of total US traffic), people.com (up 70% to .54% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic). These five sites alone reached 4.42% of all U.S. Internet users online.

Attention is a metric that considers the collective time all U.S. Internet users spend online and calculates what percentage of that time was spent on a given website on a particular day. Once again, tmz.com showed the greatest increase on 6/25, up 478% over the day before and 272% year over year to .037% of all time spent online. However, people.com garnered the most attention of all the celebrity sites on that day with .053% of total time spent online (up 71% from 6/24 and 50% year over year). The other celebrity sites also showed increases - eonline.com (up 175% to .032% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic).

Although some may credit MJ’s never-ending fame to his character flaws ridden with tabloid headlines, his musical career was undoubtedly flooded with accomplishments – 2 time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time Grammy Award winner, and over 750 million records sold worldwide to name a few. The polarizing effect of his personal life’s blunders and undeniable talent obviously kept audiences captivated and will continue to captivate them for years to come. His passing even added another notch to his belt – “king of the Internet”… for a day.

The summer movie blockbuster season is just about here, with major new releases set to hit theaters in the next couple weeks. Studies show that advertising support can break or make a blockbuster in the lead up to opening night.

On the web, movie advertisers love big, bold banners on popular movie sites like Yahoo! Movies, Fandango and MySpace. Here at Compete, we’ve got an eye on the MySpace homepage and saw some great looking creative in May.

In a recent post, we saw how 72% of MySpace visitors saw the homepage – the crown jewel in MySpace’s strategy to sell advertising like portals. That’s a huge volume of impressions, but how valuable are they really?

To get a better sense, we looked at same day viewthrough or the rate at which ad-exposed unique visitors visited the movie page.

Terminator Salvation clearly kicked MySpace movie ad butt! At 0.80% Viewthrough, Terminator outperformed the average by 2.7x.

Fractions of a percent may not seem like much, but keep in mind that MySpace had nearly 57 million unique visitors last month – that translates to tens of thousands of ad viewthroughs everyday.

Some fans just can’t get enough. We also took a look at those MySpace users who saw a movie ad and decided to do a little research.

Ah, the Trekkies. Of course, geekdom went crazy when Star Trek came to the silver screen last month. MySpace geeks (not an oxymoron) were no exception, with .11% of ad exposed visitors also heading warp speed over to IMDB.

As the biggest movie research site on the net, it’s not exactly, “Going boldy where no man has gone before.” But with at 3.2x the average for other movies on MySpace in May, it certainly got us thinking…

What if both winners joined up for a sequel? “Terminator Trekkers.” Now that’s one movie that MySpacers would pay to see!

Thinking back to my childhood, a week just wasn’t complete in the Bulger house if my grandmother didn’t get her fill of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a tradition that she looked forward to all week, yet never once did I see an angry mob of people knocking down a KFC’s door demanding free chicken. However, this past month, when Colonel Sanders and Oprah Winfrey cooked up a little free chicken marketing campaign, a fowl uprising took place.

I first learned about the free Grilled Chicken meal offer from Oprah when I saw both “KFC” and “Oprah” were top trends on Twitter. Upon further investigation, I learned that a page on Oprah’s website was re-directing traffic to KFC’s new microsite for their new Grilled Chicken product, unthinkfc.com. Customers were able to receive their free Grilled Chicken meal via a coupon on unthinkfc.com. Lending a hand in guiding online attention to the free Grilled Chicken meal, coupons.com also played a crucial role in referral traffic to unthinkfc.com. In May, coupons.com referred 34.1% of unthinkfc.com referral traffic; oprah.com was slightly less with 30.2% of unthinkfc.com referral traffic.

In just a short period of time, less than 24 hours, the promotion had received a tremendous amount of attention. The chart below is the Daily Reach for the website unthinkfc.com from May 3 through May 9, the week in which the free offer was made available (the offer was available from 9 a.m. CDT on May 5th, to 11:59 p.m. CDT on May 6th). Daily Reach is a metric that shows how many people visit a website as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users online. So, as depicted in the chart below, on May 6th an astounding 3.73% of the U.S. Internet population visited unthinkfc.com.

The big question is whether this free promotion had a lasting effect for KFC throughout the month of May. According to the graph below, the answer to that question is no. Traffic to kfc.com and unthinkfc.com peaked during the week of the promotion - Unique Visitors were 2.85 million and 8.75 million, respectively. However, following that promotion week, traffic quickly dropped off. Unique Visitors to kfc.com decreased 73% W-O-W and Unique Visitors to unthinkfc.com had a decrease of 98% W-O-W.

“The Oprah Effect” is also clearly visible in the graph below, depicted by the orange bar. In the week of the free offer, 7.95 million Unique Visitors went to the Grilled Chicken coupon landing page on oprah.com. Many of these people were seeking out further information following the mention on her show or those who were following her Twitter feed.

In the end, the massive amount of attention left many coupon holders with an empty feeling in their stomachs. It seems the attention that the free offer received was more than KFC was able to handle. As demand for the free Kentucky Grilled Chicken skyrocketed and supply started running low, many restaurants were forced to say, “free chicken… no clucking way!”

It’s amazing to see how popular sites like twitter.com and coupons.com, combined with “The Oprah Effect” and a struggling economy, created a strong marketing campaign for KFC and the Kentucky Grilled Chicken product. Even in the wake of the free chicken coupon fiasco, KFC has seen overall sales increase; a positive outcome for what is some good grilled chicken. I guess my grandmother was way ahead of this trend!

Many of the blockbuster movies this year come with an established fan base from another medium, but Star Trek is unique in that its the sub-culture runs so deep that the Trekkie name has become has become common knowledge. I was curious to see if this strong group of followers was affecting where people are finding information about the movie.

While official channels, social media sites and and major movie online destinations make up the majority of the list, a couple fan-based sites show up in the top ten, something we didn’t see as much of couple months ago for Watchmen. Both memory-alpha.com and trekmovie.com were started by fans and have no official ties to the movie or the series. Movie marketers would be well-served to tap into unofficial but influential sites like these for future releases with a similar following.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, one of the season’s first blockbusters, was released last week and provides a good point for comparison, both because of release date and the established group of fans from the X-Men comics and earlier films.

Considering that Wolverine opened with over $85 million in its first weekend and was only able to slightly overtake Star Trek in Reach for the official websites during the week of its launch (and still a week before Star Trek’s), it looks like the Trekkies and other movie-goers could make this upcoming opening weekend an epic one.

Negotiations between the Boston Globe and the unions over cost-cutting have come to a successful conclusion, and it seems that the Globe will continue publishing. This is just one of many major newspapers to struggle recently, and yet another sign that traditional channels are losing ground to the internet.

While the newspaper isn’t as widely circulated as it once was, the Boston Globe name still holds some weight and readers are seeking it out in different form.

Boston.com hosts the online version of the Boston Globe as well as content from other sources, including job search powered by Monster and car search powered by Cars.com. Six of the top ten terms driving traffic to Boston.com included mention of the Globe. The site had nearly five and a half million unique visitors last month, which is up 74% from March of last year and 120% from two years ago.

The physical version of the paper is going through tough times, but demand for the reporting remains high. Hopefully this agreement between the paper and the unions marks the beginnings of finding a solution so that readers can continue to get their news in whatever form they please.