Kim Kardashian’s photo on her wedding day was hailed as the most liked Instagram picture of 2014. Not satisfied with such glory, Kim also recently attempted to “break the internet” with her infamous Paper Magazine cover (sorry no hyperlink here – keeping this all PG). Whether or not she did remains to be seen but, with 2014 drawing to a close, there’s no better time to look back over the past year and countdown some of the other top moments that – for lack of a better phrase – “broke the internet” in 2014.
So what qualifies as breaking the internet? In my opinion, it’s any instance that spreads like wildfire across the internet either intentionally (i.e. spreading awareness for a cause, an event, a launch) or otherwise (i.e. a company is breached). This year, there were many instances that not only broke the internet, but also served up great news pegs for creative and timely media pitches and content campaigns.
Here are 4 other things that broke the internet in 2014 (in no particular order):
- World Cup: This spring, World Cup soccer games captivated international audiences across traditional broadcast, mobile and internet mediums. In fact, throughout World Cup 2014, ESPN.com averaged nearly 13,000,000 daily unique visitors and 12,000,000 video starts per day, up 40 percent and 161 percent, respectively, over 2010. But sports fans weren’t the only ones capitalizing on this year’s soccer craze – the Associated Press published a topical guide for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, compiling essential terms, spelling and usage for the month-long competition. A perfect example of how any business is smartly able to tie their strengths in to timely, culturally relevant happenings.
- Frozen: Although Frozen hit in theatres on November 27, 2013, I’m going to count it as a 2014 phenomenon. Why? Because of the title song “Let It Go.” While I personally wish that people would literally just let this song go – I can’t argue with the numbers. According to Walt Disney Animation Studios’ official YouTube video, the song’s sequence performance by Idina Menzel has been viewed a total of 376,013,729 times! What’s better than this, you ask? When you type in “let it go parody” into YouTube’s search, 1,400,000 results pop up.
- The iCloud Hack: A week or so before Apple planned to debut its new iPhone – talk about bad timing – news broke about the leak of nude celebrity photos from its iCloud online services. Suddenly the hack was covered in nearly every news and celebrity gossip outlet, and in turn, “curiosity killed the cat” (or so they say) and many people flocked to their computers to catch a glimpse of the sensational images. While this event was extremely unfortunate for those that were affected, this type of breach served as an all too important reminder about the importance of implementing the highest security standards to avoid breaches and hacks.
- Ice Bucket Challenge: This summer, the “Ice Bucket Challenge” raised both money and awareness for ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease,) while simultaneously lighting social media channels on fire. Between June 1 and Aug. 13, more than 1.2 million videos were shared on Facebook and the phenomenon was mentioned more than 2.2 million times on Twitter since July 29, according to those sites. Consequently, donations to the ALS Association spiked: as of August 29, the ALS Association had received $100.9 million in donations, compared to $2.8 million during the same time period last year before. The Ice Bucket challenge clearly broke the internet, but all for a very good cause.
So, what can we expect to break the internet in 2015? Only time will tell …