Trump was indicted. Here’s how we knew it was big news.

Our data platform is always-on, and reports in near-real time. This means if something big happens we see it immediately reflected in the data we collect and report on.

On March 30 2023, at 17.30 the news broke that former US President Donald Trump had been indicted. Across the USA, viewers turned to streaming news to hear the full story.

These graphs show two different US streamers, and how their traffic and ad slots responded.

Both show a similar response to content consumption – the news broke, and viewing Sessions went up. In the first case, Ad Slots corresponded with a like-for-like increase, whereas in the second case, the monetisation didn’t tack as closely, although it does perform strongly.

As news coverage stopped, and Americans went to sleep on the news that their former President would be appearing in court, viewing and ad slot levels return to normal.

Over in our engineering hub, our engineers were watching as demands on our servers also experienced a massive surge.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, our systems barely registered a twitch.

Over to our Head of Product and Engineering, Dan Caragea, for the final word: “What I find fascinating – and this has happened before – is that we can detect global events happening. Even if we have no idea why, we can tell a global event has taken place. Or, in this case, a major continent-level event.”

If you’d like to know more about our always-on, near real-time monitoring and analytics platform, get in touch.