Covid-19 has held the attention of people on the open web on a scale that surpasses anything before seen in the internet era.

Since early March, we’ve seen traffic to news websites spike to unprecedented levels around the globe, driven by people’s need to understand all the ways the virus has been impacting their lives and communities.

To help organize this flurry of readership, we’ve added the Coronavirus Readership Trends map to our Taboola Trends webpage. We hope this interactive graphic proves useful for journalists attempting to understand readership trends, researchers looking into how information about the virus is spreading, and anyone who wants to know which topics related to coronavirus are impacting people at a massive scale.

The shows how many people are reading about the coronavirus in the past hour, as well as what percentage of the readership coronavirus articles are capturing. We’ve counted millions of page views per hour on articles about the coronavirus consistently over the past month, indicating a level of reader attention surpassing any topic we’ve seen before.

The data come from the thousands of news publishers Taboola partners with around the globe. We use natural language processing AI to scan all of the articles we see to determine the topic of each article. Since coronavirus has become the everything story of this era, our map allows you to further explore the specific topics people are reading about for each country.

For each bubble, you can see the amount of total page views we’ve seen in the past hour for the corresponding topic.

The bubbles are color coded by vertical.

Taken together, the Coronavirus Readership Trends map offers a single snapshot of what’s capturing people’s attention at this incredibly unique moment in time.

These massive topics of interest — from anxiety over supplies like masks and hand sanitizer to the enormously consequential decisions of political leaders to the search for new sources of entertainment while in quarantine — give insight into our collective psyche as we respond to a crisis that has impacted every aspect of our everyday lives.

We invite you to explore the map and hope it helps you better understand the many extraordinary stories of loss, sorrow, tragedy, bravery, and hope this crisis has caused.

What about the other popular topics?

Our news publisher partners have complimentary access to data on trending topics in the Topic Insights part of Taboola Newsroom, our real time audience analytics platform.

In addition to topics data, Newsroom provides readership and engagement metrics, customizable alerts, homepage AB testing for headlines and image, and more.

For topics specifically, Newsroom helps editorial teams understand not only the biggest opportunities overall, but also the most popular among audiences on social media and search. It also lets publishers foster audience loyalty by letting them understand the topics core audience members and likely subscribers are reading on their sites and elsewhere on our network.

It’s a fun bubbly-matrix filled with useful data. Here’s how it looks.

We’re always looking for interesting ways to use our data to help bring context to how news readers are interacting with real-world events such as analyzing the amount of type of information about the US Census that’s reaching readers through the news.

Publisher Benchmark Report

DM @franberkman on Twitter if you’re doing any research or reporting that you think our data could help support.

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