PRESS RELEASE

The coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla dominated the British internet over the weekend – on Saturday, AI algorithms scanning the internet registered almost 1.3 million internet activities directly linked to the coronation, reaching an astounding audience of 6.4 billion views.

An analysis of over 2.6 million articles, comments, social media posts and blog entries made in English during the Coronation Week (1-7 May) was conducted with SentiOne Listen, an AI-enhanced internet monitoring service offered by SentiOne, a European company recognised by the EU as one of its top-20 deep tech scale-ups. The company specialises in employing cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions to develop customer service chatbots and analyse the sentiment behind comments related to companies and their services.

It was as challenging as fascinating to employ our internet monitoring tool to deliver some understanding of how broadly the coronation was discussed online and what emotions it sparked amongst internet users. The results of our analysis, positive sentiment and wide reach of online comments prove that the Royal Family is still a very strong brand, as the overall brand health index of all royals improved following the coronation – including Prince Harry and Prince Andrew. The strongest drivers of the Windsors’ brand image are Princess Catherine, Princess Anne and Wales’ children – said Agnes Uba, SentiOne’s Product Marketing Manager – Overall, positive reactions and live commentary outweighed comments from Republicans and others with the anti-royalist sentiment. The latter were only visible on Friday before the coronation and on Saturday late afternoon.

Positive reactions outweigh negative three-to-one

While most of the mentions (79 per cent) on the coronation day were classified as neutral (this result reflects the extensive media coverage of the event), 15 per cent of all online entries were positive (classified by AI algorithms as expressions of excitement or happiness). In comparison, a mere 6 per cent were associated with negative emotions (i.e. anger, sadness, disappointment). The impact of negative comments about the coronation was further limited by the reluctance of internet users to share them – positive reactions had more than ten-fold greater audience than negative ones (205 to 20 million views, respectively). 

Twitter dominated as the platform where this debate took place – more than half (57 per cent) of entries identified by SentiOne’s algorithms were tweets, and over a third (36 per cent) were posts and comments on Facebook. A low percentage of mentions on Instagram and TikTok may indicate that younger audiences less eagerly followed the coronation. Overall, 61 per cent of comments about the coronation registered came from male internet users. However, the debate concerning three members of the Royal Family – Princess Charlotte, Prince Harry and Prince Andrew – was dominated by women, with 81, 68 and 53 posts and comments made by female internet users.

Prince Harry is the second most-mentioned Royal after King Charles

SentiOne also analysed the number of mentions, their reach and reactions to individual members of the Royal Family during Coronation Week (1-7 May).

• Unsurprisingly, King Charles III led in all categories, with over 540,000 mentions attracting 14 billion views worldwide. The emotions about the crowned monarch were predominantly positive – positive comments’ reach (540 million views) massively outweighed the spread of expressions of hostile reception (75 million).  
• The second most-mentioned member of the Royal Family was Prince Harry. The Duke of Sussex was mentioned in online debates more than 200,000 times. It is significantly more than the results of Queen Camilla (182,000 mentions) and more than Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales had combined (94,000 and 66,000 mentions).
• Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, was the only person whose number of mentions declined during the coronation week. During the last week of April, she was mentioned in online debates 184,000 times, almost as often as King Charles (197,000). Her absence at Westminster Abbey resulted in a 31-per-cent collapse in mentions, although she still was the fourth most-mentioned member of the Royal Family.
• The late Lady Diana was mentioned 63,000 times.
• Penny Mordaunt’s perfect performance at the coronation, in which she carried a 3.6 kg sword for almost an hour, was received with attention and praise – from week to week, Conservative MP’s online mentions skyrocketed from 280 to over 7,000 and the debate reached – 88 per cent of non-neutral comments were positive.

Most popular Royal Family members by number of mentions during the Coronation Week:

Strong Brand Health Index of the Royal Family

To provide its clients with an easy-to-understand measure of their services’ reception online, SentiOne breaks down vast amounts of data into the Brand Health Index (BHI). Scaled from zero to one, BHI is the ratio between positive and negative mentions, where 1.00 indicates that all the comments were positive and 0.01 indicates that there was not a single mention that AI did not classify as coming from anger, disappointment or sadness.

• Overall, members of the Royal Family attract significantly more positive than negative mentions. Less than a third of comments about King Charles III and the heir to the throne, Prince William, were unfavourable (BHI of 0.7). The Queen attracted a slightly lower proportion of positive comments (BHI 0.66)
• Princess Charlotte (BHI 0.86), Prince Louis (BHI 0.81) and their mother, Princess Catherine (BHI 0.8) were the top-three members of the Royal Family with the best positive-to-negative mentions ratio during the coronation week. Only one in five comments about the future Queen was negative during that time.
• The lowest score noted in the two weeks was Prince Andrew’s BHI of 0.51 during the week preceding the coronation week – the Duke of York still attracted minimally more positive than negative comments. 
• Comments related to Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, were divided, yet her supporters dominated the debate. The relatively shallow index level of 0.54 likely results from an unfavourable public reaction to her decision not to attend the coronation – while Meghan’s index remained constant, Prince William’s BHI rose from 0.56 to 0.62 due to his presence at Westminster Abbey.

Most popular Royal Family members by the ratio between positive and negative mentions during the Coronation Week:

During the 11 years of the company’s existence, SentiOne invested over 10M dollars into its proprietary AI algorithms that monitor over 150 million mentions daily, map out sentiment and emotions like joy, anger, sadness and sarcasm. Today the tool is used by Earlier this year, the companytheir marketing activities. The company earlier this year released SentiCharts – real  time leaderboard analysing top 100 brands online, updated on a daily basis. 

The analysis covered over 2.5 million mentions from online opinions, posts, comments on all major social media, websites, forums, news outlets and blogs in the period from 1 to 7 May. 

SentiOne is a European AI company launched in 2011. Its mission is to support clients in automation of business processes with a wide range of AI-enhanced tools, including internet monitoring services, communication platforms and high-end conversational chatbots and voicebots. SentiOne is used by brands such as Procter & Gamble, BNP Paribas, Etisalat, Alior Bank, InPost, McDonald’s,  Mindshare, Mediacom, Saatchi & Saatchi and others. It has offices in London, Warsaw, Gdansk, Ostrava, Budapest, Munich, Eindhoven, Mexico and Dubai. Its products are used  by more than 400 clients in Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Columbia and Brazil.