The media is reaching saturation point in its coverage of the ice bucket challenge. But what has actually been achieved?
The format is simple - somebody has water, often full of ice cubes, dumped over their head. They then nominate people they know to undertake the same challenge.
There have been in excess of 2.4 million ice bucket-related videos posted on Facebook, and 28 million people have uploaded, commented on or liked ice bucket-related posts.
On image sharing website Instagram there have been 3.7 million videos uploaded with the hashtags #ALSicebucketchallenge and #icebucketchallenge. Justin Bieber's has been the most popular - with about one million "likes".
The stunt is typically intended to raise money and awareness for the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association. Its British equivalent, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, has also benefited.
From 29 July to 28 August this year ALS received $98.2m - compared with $2.7m donated during the same period last year.
Pre-ice bucket, the MND Association would receive on average £200,000 a week in donations. From 22 to 29 August, it received £2.7m.
In the UK, other charities have benefited with Macmillan Cancer Support raising £3m from challenges. Water Aid has seen a spike in donations, including £47,000 in one day - 50% higher than it ever received in a single day before. The money came in part from people bemoaning the water wasted in the challenges.
But the other purpose of the campaign has been in raising awareness.
"Do you think Anna Wintour, Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham were talking about ALS a few months ago? No, I very much doubt it," says Shannon Murray, an actor, writer and disability rights campaigner.
"It's been very celebrity-orientated and it plays into our culture of putting everything about ourselves out there on social media. Some people have chosen to do it in a bikini, some have chosen white T-shirts, some people have obviously done it to raise their profile and that's up to them. Personally it makes me a bit uncomfortable, but actually the bottom line is that people weren't talking about MND two months ago, and now they are."
A crude measurement can be found in Google searches. Searches for both ALS and Lou Gehrig's Disease, an alternative name in the US, rose sharply from 13 August to a peak on 21 August. Since then they have been declining. The term MND rose sharply from 20 August, reaching a peak on 26 August.
From 1 August to 27 August this year, the ALS Wikipedia page had 2,717,754 views. This compared with the 1,662,842 people who had visited the page during the whole of the preceding 12 months, according to data company Dataviz.
Average daily visits to the ALS association website were about 17,500 before the ice bucket challenge, compared with the peak of 4.5 million visits on 20 August (of which 83% were new to the site). During the past month there have been about 30 million visitors in total.
Average daily website visits to the MND association have risen from 1,400 to 153,000 on its biggest day - 26 August.
And as of 29 August the ice bucket challenge had 4,483,726 Twitter mentions. ALS Twitter followers had increased from 8,975 in early July to 21,100, while MND had over 6,000 new followers.
So it's probably safe to say that awareness has been increased.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29013707
Structure of the Lead：
WHO-every one join ice bucket challenge
WHEN-in these days
WHAT-
WHY-under stand the active meen
WHERE-every peple in the world
HOW- join ice bucket challenge
key words:
format:格式
equivalent:當量
campaign:運動
measurement:測量
awareness:意識
