Oscars by the Numbers: How Ellen's Selfie Tweet Spread Like Wildfire

By Brian Anthony Hernandez  on 
Oscars by the Numbers: How Ellen's Selfie Tweet Spread Like Wildfire
Ellen DeGeneres takes a photo with, from left, Kevin Spacey, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jared Leto during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday, March 2, 2014, in Los Angeles. Credit: John Shearer

Like the rest of us, the folks working at Twitter can't get over how quickly Ellen Degeneres' multi-celebrity selfie moved across the web Sunday during the 86th Academy Awards.

On Tuesday, Twitter's Michael Fleischman, head of media science, offered deeper insight into the social media activity spawned from the Oscars. The ceremony attracted billions of impressions from Sunday at 5 p.m. ET to Monday at 5 a.m. ET, he revealed.

"Tweets about the Oscars were viewed over 3.3 billion times worldwide," Fleischman wrote.

[seealso slug="twitter-won-oscars/"]

Drilling down, Fleischman discovered that 5.5 million people sent 19.1 million tweets, and 37 million people viewed them on Twitter.com as well as Twitter mobile and desktop. "That’s nearly as many as the 43 million people who watched the show," he noted.

It appears he is trying to infer that Twitter conversations helped the Oscars net its highest TV audience since 2000, when 46.5 million watched the Academy Awards that year.

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

Fleischman also detailed the numbers behind Ellen's selfie tweet, which now holds the record for most retweets, sitting pretty at 3.2 million RTs as of Tuesday after quickly surpassing President Barack Obama's "Four More Years" tweet on Sunday.

8.1 million people saw the tweet a total of 26 million times (impressions). "The way we measure views is by looking at a metric known as impressions: how many times tweets are displayed to users," Fleischman said.

13,711 web pages embedded the tweet, and those embeds were seen 6.8 million times by 5 a.m. ET on Monday.

Overall, the tweet was seen 32.8 million times.

The tweet has been retweeted more than 3.2 million times (it was at 2.4 million RTs by 5 a.m. ET on Monday.

Mashable Image
Credit: Twitter

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BONUS: 8 Odd and Inspiring Oscars Quotes We Overheard Backstage

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