ColtonCat

According to the news, Superbowl 44 (2010) has surpassed the final episode of “M*A*S*H” which set the record 27 years ago by attracting a mere 105.97 million viewers, to become the most watched television show in history, with an estimated 106.5 million pairs of eyeballs on the game.

So yes, Superbowl 44 was big, it is debatable, however, if it was as big as the “M*A*S*H” finalé that held the previous record, when one considers that 27 years ago there were far fewer televisions in households than there are today and consequently the television watching population was a lot smaller. That however is not the point of Mr Cat’s post here when it occurred to him that advertising has become totally invasive in our lives since the early 80s, and that the primary way that revenue is generated from a televised event such as Superbowl 44 is through paid advertising. These days, Mr Cat would imagine that the bulk of that advertising would somehow result in a trip to the web by a party interested in this advertising, so Mr Cat headed over to try and get some graphs, because he likes graphs, of the Internet traffic during Superbowl 44.

Akamai, one of the largest Content Delivery Networks CDNs it turns out keeps figures of exactly this.

Notice the spike in the graph at the end of the 4^th quarter, with the advertising consumption according to Akamai reaching around 1.17 million visitors per minute, well up from the average of about 300 thousand visitors per minute.

These are pretty astronomical figures, and Mr Cat can understand why so many people are making so much money now from online advertising on their blogs and affiliate websites; there is just so many clicks to go around and even if you started an affiliate site today, you need only a small fraction of that modest average of 300 thousand visitors per minute to make yourself very comfortable.