Many of us at Mozilla and within the Mozilla community were excited when Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch (a big thanks to Jonathan Zittrain).  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what we did:  we looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then we drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

We saw a big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later: