The outbreak of conflict in the Middle East sparked an extraordinary surge of interest in online reporting and military analysis in the Czech Republic. Viewership was significantly boosted by the fact that thousands of Czech tourists were stranded in the region due to the spring half-term holidays and the subsequent cancellation of flights, with no clear information on their return. News websites therefore recorded their highest user numbers right at the start of the month, when daily traffic remained consistently above 3.2 million unique users.
The peak in traffic in March was observed as early as 1 March, when the News category was visited by 3.3 million unique users across all devices, representing an increase of almost 20 per cent compared to the quietest days of the month. After the Czech Republic organised repatriation flights for its citizens, the situation in the region began to stabilise for Czech tourists and traffic to news websites gradually declined: from the middle of the month, news websites were visited by an average of 100,000 fewer users per day than from the start of the conflict until the final repatriation flights.
The increased amount of free time during the spring half-term holidays and the arrival of warmer weather, which encouraged outdoor activities in March, contributed to a rise in interest-based website categories, such as home and living, or hobbies, gardening and leisure. Traffic in the first category increased by 39 per cent on desktop PCs and by 26 per cent on mobile phones. Interest-based websites grew by 11 per cent on PCs and 13 per cent on mobile devices.
Source: mam.cz