Fascinating videos from the New York Times exploring where geographically-speaking traffic to its website comes from and what kinds of devices are being used to access it.

Explains Nick Bilton on the NYTimes’ Bits Blog:

The top video represents readers coming to the website from the United States. The second video shows a map of our global readers. The circles indicate two things. First, the yellow circles represent readers coming to the main website from desktop or laptop computers, and the orange circles indicate readers using mobile phones to access our mobile site. Second, the size of the circles represents the number of readers at that moment in time. You can see the corresponding time stamp in the upper left corner of the videos.

The videos show the traffic patterns for 25 June 2009 – the day news broke of Michael Jackson’s death:

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.