Protests fuel record traffic to donation sites

Traffic to donation websites has exploded over the past few weeks, amid the social reckoning around systemic racism in the United States.

• More than 20% of that traffic came from countries outside the United States, which speaks to the tremendous impact that the protests are having abroad.

Details: Of all the different types of donation sites, traffic to sites collecting donations around police reform organizations saw by far the biggest increase.

• "Visits to police reform organization sites grew tremendously year over year — in looking at daily traffic trends, these sites went from receiving less than 1,000 visits per day to nearly 88,000 visits per day during the first two weeks of  June," said Ilana Marks, Marketing Analyst at Similarweb.

By the numbers: The average daily traffic to the 99 donation sites measured by SimilarWeb was 110% higher year-over-year in May and 179% higher year-over-year in June (to-date). The spikes began occurring around the same time as the nationwide protests.

• Traffic to the donation sites from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and other countries made up about one-fifth of the total donation traffic.

The big picture: It's worth noting that social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, accounted for nearly 32% of all traffic to the donation sites tracked by SimilarWeb, surpassing direct site visits at 26%. This speaks to the enormous impact social media had on getting people to donate to the cause.

• As Axios' Neal Rothschild notes, no other social change movement in the Trump era has come close to the intensity of social media attention forged in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. That social traction is pushing users to open up their wallets for the cause.