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On Wed Nov 6, Ford Risley wrote:
>
>...I'd be interested in hearing reports from folks about how things worked
>last night. Hard numbers, of course, would be welcome, but I'd also like to
>pass along to my student your exciting moments, horror stories, and just
>interesting anecdotes in general. Many thanks.

According to an AP report, CNN's site peaked at 5 million hits an hour
between 9 and 10 p.m. EST,  Over the course of election night, they
recorded 50 million visits -- and that's only the people who got through.
``The record for CNN on the main site on a single day had been 18 million
hits, on the day of the Iraqi bombing,'' according to executive producer
Mike Riley.

Although the long-haul backbone reportedly held up well, there were
reported slow-downs at many of the most popular servers. CNN had beefed up
its servers but still  had periods when its machines were all busy, leading
to requests to users to try later.

Users of MSNBC found it often took several minutes to load a page. It
recored more than 3 million hits during the evening, with many users
digging into data on state races -- as  might be expected as these were
less likely to be reported in the network coverage.

"The T-1's  out there are rocking,'' reported MSNBC's James Kinsella.

My personal experience was that The New York Times' site yesterday was
uncharacteristcially slow, which I attribute (unless told otherwise) to a
high volume after morning after usage. On the other hand, Boston.Com, which
had excellent local coverage, was perhaps even a bit perkier than usual
yesterday.

Kinsella's assessment was that ``This election night feels quite frankly
like the validation that TV got from the Nixon-Kennedy debates." Or more
likely, I think,  the earlier boost it got from carrying the 1952
Presidential conventions. Back then, the proportion of households with TV
sets was closer to the proportion with Internet access today.

Anyway, it seemed to be a good night for news and information online. It
probably introduced many occassional or new users to the value of online
for specific information needs. The next hurdle is for all the news sites
to track whether their routine daily volume reflects any residual carryover
from election night visitors.







 



Benjamin Compaine
Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunications
Chairman, Center for Information Industry Research
Temple University
215-204-6434            e-mail:  bcompaine@usa.net
***********************************
http://astro.temple.edu/~ciir
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