Nov 06 2008
US Election Website Traffic
I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.
- The top news websites are ranked in Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites. Yahoo News was the most popular, although I think they are actually a news aggregator. It is also interesting to see that some news websites actually had a decrease in traffic!
- The top news websites also received a significant amount of foreign visitors, as described in News Sites Attract Record Audience on Election Night. It is estimated that at the peak time there were more than 8.5 million visitors per minute! This is a new world record according to the linked Net Usage Index for News article. This article also lists the previous 14 world records.
- The viral effect of the candidates’ videos is described in How To Make Your Video Go Viral: Become President. The official version of Obama’s victory speech on YouTube has already been watched over 2 million times, and I expect this figure to keep growing! Furthermore, many people have already uploaded their own recordings of this speech. (On a side note, I am not really convinced that this is a viral video!)
I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!
Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?
I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:
Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.
I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!