Internet Blackout Day: By the Numbers

   advocacy / campaign / congress / Internet / internet blackout / pipa / social media / sopa      Posted on January 31, 2012 by Amy

Last week’s Internet Blackout against SOPA/PIPA was remarkable.  Tens of thousands of websites participated and millions of people called/emailed/tweeted about it.  Here are the stats:

  • 75,000+ websites participated in the Wednesday Internet Blackout in some capacity including: Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Etsy, Reddit, WordPress, Firefox, Wired
  • More than 7 million people signed Google’s petition -- 5,000+ per minute
  • More than 10 million petition signatures
  • Over 3 million emails sent, 350,000 from sopastrike.com and americancensorship.org alone
  • According to Engine Advocacy, 2,000 calls were attempted per second to congressional offices
  • On Twitter there were 3.9 million SOPA-related tweets in one day
  • On Wikipedia 8 million users looked up contact information for their member of Congress; Wikipedia received 162 million page views in a single day, 12 thousand people posted on its blog

The folks at Covario calculated the impact of the blackout.  Forbes summarized it nicely:

  • 302,222 hours were not spent on Reddit
  • At around 33,000 job postings a day and $25 a post, Craigslist could have lost up to $825,00 in revenue yesterday.
  • 100,000 WordPress blogs were not created.

And politicians reacted before, during and after Internet Blackout:

And even better, the ProPublica.org visual of pre and post positions of members of Congress: