Sad Chart Of the Day: American Web Surfers Care More Than Brits About Royal Wedding

Most of you don’t care about the upcoming Royal Wedding in any way. But if you’re in the media business, there’s a good chance you do care about this thing, because your audience does. (The image I used to the right, for instance, is from ABCNews.com’s dedicated wedding page, which went up earlier today).

And, oddly enough, if you work for a media company that caters to Americans, you might care more about Prince William and Kate Middleton than your counterparts in the U.K.

At least that’s the conclusion we can draw from this surprising Nielsen chart, which tracks online media mentions of Friday’s event.

Note that the chart isn’t measuring raw tonnage of coverage, but share of coverage. And that green line at the top is the U.S. Surprising, right?

Just to be clear, I wanted to make sure I understood what Nielsen was measuring here. Here’s their response: “’traditional media’ includes news sites that are online only (Huffington Post, for example) or web counterparts for print or broadcast outlets (including BBC.co.uk, CNN.com, WSJ.com, CBSNews.com, FT.com, ESPN.com), industry publications (AdAge.com, Adweek.com, academic journals, etc.) and wire services (Reuters, AP). The corpus of data is 45,000 publications/sites around the world; this study reviewed just over 18,000 in the U.S., approximately 6,800 in the U.K. and roughly 1,200 in Australia.”