Safer Internet Day 2009 in the media Celebrated all around the world in 50 countries, the sixth Safer Internet Day raised an unprecedented level of interest and of media echo. All sorts of media, from print to electronic, were solicited to promote e-safety messages.

In order to assess the impact of Safer Internet Day, follow its progression and encourage the improvement of the Insafe network's communication strategy, each node and participating organisation was asked to collect different indicators (Number of visits on their website, number of Google hits, media coverage, …). In general, the media coverage was bigger than ever in most countries. Manually searching using Google News also confirms this trend and ensures that we picked up a wide amount of coverage: 4782 articles mentioning Safer Internet Day were published between the 9 February and the 9 March 2009.

According to the data, in most countries the press and the internet have shown more interest in Safer Internet Day than TV and radio. The access to broadcast media is indeed limited, and TV air time is often too expensive. However, some countries have been particularly successful in reaching those media, such as Cyprus (17 TV occurrences), Slovakia (29 TV occurrences) or Spain (30 TV occurrences). We can also underline the case of the Latvian node which was able to buy air time, notably thanks to the decrease in price due to the economic crisis. From 10 to 24 February 2009, the video clip on cyberbullying was consequently shown 684 times in Latvia! However,  in general the media coverage is more internet/press oriented.

Another trend worth noting is that regional and local journalists are often more interested in Safer Internet Day and easier to approach than national media. As a result, there is an increased coverage of these issues in the regional and local media, while national media remain difficult to penetrate. One possible explanation is that European activities, which are more likely to be dealt with by national media, raise little media attention compared to all the activities organised at a national level. Furthermore, the nodes often stress the discriminatory media treatment of internet safety issues. As it is impossible to retain editorial control, certain aspects of the internet receive more media attention, and negative stories generally tend to be more newsworthy than general information about safe use of the internet. This means that it can be difficult to promote Safer Internet Day objectively, without focusing on mass appeal stories.

With regards to the web statistics, here again, the results are sometimes tremendous: in Slovenia, the number of Google hits went from 10 on the 3rd February to more than 40,000 on the 10th. Web figures are also high in Bulgaria, Greece and Poland and the interest was generally maintained over the weeks following the event, which is an encouraging sign. In Finland, the number of Google hits has more than tripled between the 10th February and the 17th February. The same long lasting increase but at a lower level has been observed in Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Even if overall the articles on Safer Internet Day 2009 mostly deal with e-safety, schools or public authorities, more and more also involve industries and social networking websites, notably because of the focus this year was on cyberbullying, a topic which somehow has succeeded to penetrate the political agenda of most European countries.

Moreover the number of visits on the nodes' websites has generally more than doubled on Safer Internet Day, with particularly high numbers of hits in specific countries like Belgium, Bulgaria, Lithuania or Poland. The number of visits to the Insafe portal has also dramatically increased during the week leading to Safer Internet Day. The average number of visits during the year is 471.17 visits / day . But, between the 3rd February and the 10th, the number of visits have increased by 584% on the homepage and 506% on the page dedicated to Safer Internet Day. This page was therefore the most visited since Safer Internet Day 2008: 6,593 individual visitors on the 10 February, in contrast to the 4,547 visitors on SID 2008.