At the time of the first showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in countries including the US and Canada, Internet traffic as a whole dropped drastically from “normal” levels. Germany felt the highest impact from the force, as their numbers plummeted by 11.7%, according to data from cybersecurity firm Imperva Incapsula.
Star Wars now holds the record for the largest opening weekend in North America, pulling in a whopping $238 million in ticket sales and $517 million worldwide. Thus, beating out the previous record holder Jurassic World that earned $208 million it’s opening weekend.
“As the movie started rolling out in theaters around the world, we saw a noticeable decline in activity on our network,” Igal Zeifman wrote in a post. “This was the result of a huge number of fans sinking into their movie theater seats to enjoy the latest from the galaxy far, far away.”
(source: Incapsula.com)
The decline could be caused simply from the vast amounts of people that went to see the movie or for those that have waited to see it trying to avoid the threat of the “spoiler jihad.”
“With that in mind, we want to salute the brave /r/StarWars/ moderators who continue to throw themselves into the fray of new comments and suspect discussions, deleting potential spoilers at the risk of exposing themselves to information that may ruin their own movie-going experience.”
How has the movie effected your traffic? Did you notice a significant increase? Or have you used this as a marketing tool of some sort? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
