Historic Election Day Sets Traffic Records
With unprecedented resources for tracking yesterday’s election online, visitors flocked to news sites in droves. But notably, while web and cable viewer numbers were sizzling hot, the big three networks were down 16 percent vs. the election four years ago. ABC was down 2 percent, NBC 24 percent, and CBS 25 percent. Cable networks CNN and Fox News Channel actually beat CBS last night, according to preliminary numbers.
Here are some of the early web traffic returns.
Akamai (via Beet.tv): The content delivery network saw a peak of 8.57 million global visitors per minute at the time Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech, topping a previous high of 7.3 million in July 2006 when Ghana eliminated the U.S. in the World Cup. Akamai powers CNN, NBC, the BCC, Reuters and others. It started tracking web traffic peaks in August 2005.
CNN: The news site had more than 27 million unique visitors, a site record, on Nov. 4. Its CNN.com Live video service delivered 4.9 million live streams (nearly tripling its previous record). Plus 276 million page views for CNN.com and 6.7 million on-demand video streams.
ABCNews.com had an all-time high of 3.4 million uniques and 24.2 million page views, with more than 340,000 live streams, even without counting upcoming reports from partners at Yahoo and Comcast.
Mogulus: The live-streaming service, which powered broadcasts for USA Today, C-SPAN, The UpTake and many more, recorded a simultaneous audience peak of 87,178.
Ustream, which powered live streams of Obama’s acceptance speech, ABC News’ live radio coverage, and James Kotecki from Politico, had more than a million visitors yesterday, “coming close to the Ustream record for most views of a single event previously set by the Republican National Convention in September 2008.” But the site doesn’t track simultaneous viewers, and the RNC was a multiday event, so it’s kind of handicapping its bragging rights on this one.
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Except Mogulus crashed and the USAToday feed didn’t work.
These guys are almost as bad as friendster was back in the day at scale..
Kevin Todds on November 5th, 2008 at 11:10 am - Permalink
Very interesting data — particularly regarding how traditional TV outlets, Cable TV and new-age media sources are offering web-based alternatives for election content (i.e., video). Cisco recently did a pre-election study that idicated the Internet was second only to TV as the preferred choice for political news/coverage among registered U.S. voters (>1800 respondents).
Check out the initial results here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/ES_WP.html
Thomas Barnett on November 5th, 2008 at 10:38 pm - Permalink
[...] ago. Cable networks CNN and Fox News Channel actually beat CBS Tuesday night. (Iwantmedia 11/6, http://newteevee.com/2008/11/05/historic-election-day-sets-traffic-records [...]
ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA « Daily Marauder on November 6th, 2008 at 1:58 pm - Permalink
[...] Other stats from Akamai: The rate of traffic on it network hit more than 2 terabits per second traffic at 12:15 p.m; it delivered more than 12 million requests per second at the same time. Akamai said it also saw its largest-ever amount of Flash streams, with more than 800 Gbps of Flash streaming served. However, it looks like net usage was actually lighter than on November’s election night: 5.4 million peak visitors per minute as compared to 8.6 million for the election. [...]
The Obama Inauguration Live Stream Stats « NewTeeVee on January 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm - Permalink
[...] Other stats from Akamai: The rate of traffic on it network hit more than 2 terabits per second traffic at 12:15 p.m; it delivered more than 12 million requests per second at the same time. Akamai said it also saw its largest-ever amount of Flash streams, with more than 800 Gbps of Flash streaming served. However, it looks like net usage was actually lighter than on November’s election night: 5.4 million peak visitors per minute as compared to 8.6 million for the election. [...]
The Obama Inauguration Live Stream Stats | Viral Video Maker on February 15th, 2009 at 4:51 am - Permalink