Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

The Impressionables

Everyone's favorite selfie heralds new statistic.

Let's go back for a minute to the world's most viral selfie. Forget that the Ellen DeGeneres photo seen round the world was shot on a Samsung, which happened to buy five minutes of precious airtime on Sunday's Oscars and should get an Academy Award for product integration.

And forget that what we're likely to remember from the show is that A-list candid, and not, as Inquirer film critic Steven Rea pointed out Wednesday, the fact that for the first time in history, a black person took a statue home for best picture.

As Twitter trumpeted the primacy of the tweet after the show, the micro-blogging giant announced a whole new way of measuring its reach.

That selfie has been re-tweeted more than three million times since Sunday - a record by far. But it's also made 32.8 million impressions.

That captures "how many times tweets are displayed to users," and so includes embeds on news sites and its presence on the feeds of all Twitter-owned properties and apps. So it's more like page views.

As Marketing Land's editor noted, "Facebook, the ball is in your court now."