NETMONITOR: BLACKOUT IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC INCREASED VISITS TO NEWS SITES - ScreenVoice.cz

On July 4, around noon, approximately one million households were left without electricity, Prague's public transport system came to a standstill, and several industrial plants were forced to suspend production. The massive power outage, which affected the capital and several other regions of the Czech Republic, significantly impacted traffic to websites in the News category.

An increase of 800,000

People watched the news online with surprise and concern, mainly on their mobile phones, and so a large increase in traffic on this platform was observed throughout the day. On July 4, nearly 3.3 million users visited news websites from their mobile phones, which is about 800,000 more than the average traffic to news websites from mobile phones during the other days of July.

The large increase in traffic from mobile phones also affected the overall data for that day, with more than 3.5 million users visiting the News category from all measured platforms. This high number of users remained throughout the day (users followed the progress of the accident, the estimated time of power restoration, and the probable causes of the outage); in the following days, news viewership fell to average levels.

July sporting events

July saw several interesting sporting events, one of which was the 112th edition of the Tour de France stage cycling race, which took place from July 5 to 27. The Sports web category grew in July on all measured devices: by 3% on classic PCs, by 9% on mobile phones, and by 4% on tablets.