To: "B. Compaine" 
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	CBS News told the LA Times in today's editions that they got one
million hits per hour, causing two of their central computers to crash.
The CNN site's claim is interesting because it got such a very small share
of the election-watching households compared to CBS.  I think it must 
have been much smaller, but I also wonder if a lot of the non-watching 
public as measured by Nielsen has switched to the Internet for more 
instantaneous and sometimes more meaningfully presented results -- not to 
mention the ability of the Net to let them select the races of interest.  
CBS updated results on many, many races "near-nstantly," the Times said.

Best,

Joe Shea
Editor-in-Chief
The American Reporter
joeshea@netcom.com
http://www.newshare.com:9999


On Thu, 7 Nov 1996, B. Compaine wrote:

> 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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From owner-online-news-digest@nando.net Thu Nov  7 13:33:50 1996
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