The marriage between Catherine Middleton and Prince William truly was the first World Wide Wedding - modern institutions on the web became intertwined with tradition and showed a great step forward into the digital age for the British monarchy.

The monarchy really did have all web bases covered. Leading the way, long before the celebrations began in March was the launch of was the British Monarchy’s Royal Wedding Website of which from here people were directed to the official Clarence House twitter page, flicker and wedding events page on Facebook. To date there have been 13.7 million visitors to the site and on the wedding day alone, there were around 15 million page views.

You Tube

While social networks provided the cyber buzz YouTube provided the event. On April the 29th The Royal Wedding channel was the most watched on the whole site, and, for the first time, YouTube had a live broadcast of the whole ceremony. There were 72 million live streams and 101 million total stream views for the day, including re-broadcasts

Twitter

The @ClarenceHouse Twitter feed were an integral part of the ceremony, with viewers keen to voice their thoughts on the big day in 140 characters or less. In fact, there was just as much of a buzz on cyberspace just much as there was hype around the many street parties held that day. Talk of the wedding not only dominated the UK but also globally, with hashtags such as #RoyalWedding and #rw11 flooding the site. In the week up to and including there were an estimated 2.1 million tweets about the wedding.

Facebook

On the day of the event just like Twitter Facebook, was awash with Royal wedding activity 684,399 status updates mentioned the royal wedding with over 9 million views to the British Monarchy Facebook page. The specially created British Monarchy’s Facebook ‘Royal Wedding’ event had 27,220 attendees; luckily for the caterers they weren’t all expecting a piece of cake!

MEC Opinion:
The way the royal wedding was consumed using new media marked a turning point, not just for the British monarchy but the media as a whole. With more ways to view, re-view and comment on the celebrations, William and Kate’s big day was the first truly interactive large-scale world event. Thirty years from now, who knows how we’ll be celebrating the wedding of the happy couple’s children...