Traffic to News Web Sites Over Two Days Sets Records
By MELINDA PATTERSON GRENIER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
Many news Web sites saw traffic hit record levels on Tuesday, and then break these records on Wednesday as millions of people scoured the Internet for information about this week's terrorist attacks.
Servers were so clogged that some searchers had to find creative ways around the logjam. Jerry Peters, of Evansville, Ind., for example, followed the breaking news on the ABC News Web site -- in Australia (www.abc.net.au/news).
"It was obvious U.S. sites were overloaded," said the 47-year-old certified public accountant, "so I immediately looked for alternative sources" of updates.
The record traffic levels reflect increasing reliance on the Internet for detailed, timely news. Sixty-four percent of people surveyed by Harris Interactive on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning said they used the Internet as a source of information about the attacks.
While only 3% said the Internet was their primary source -- trailing television at 78% and radio at 15% -- 28% said the Internet allowed them to get information at work and 26% said it was quicker to use than other sources.
The Rochester, N.Y., research and survey firm conducted the poll among 4,610 adults who are online.
Slammed by Demand
At least 12.5 million unique users logged onto MSNBC's Web site (www.msnbc.com) in the 24 hours following the first plane crash into New York's World Trade Towers, estimated Peter Dorogoff, director of communications. This was almost double the previous record of 6.5 million unique users on Nov. 8, 2000, the day after the presidential election, when the outcome was still in doubt.
Mr. Dorogoff said traffic continued on Wednesday at about the same pace as Tuesday, "but it's not as much of a slam; it's more steady."
To cope with the onslaught, MSNBC, Microsoft Corp's news-service joint venture with General Electric Co.'s NBC, stripped down to a text-only home page and worked with third-party vendors to increase server capacity.
AOL Time Warner's CNN performed similar surgery on its news site, initially removing images and shifting resources across its existing server base to keep from overloading, said Mitch Gelman, executive producer and senior vice president of CNN.com (www.cnn.com).
Then "we began to build the site back up," he said, with support for providing images and streaming video from AOL and Akamai Technologies Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of software to speed delivery of Internet content.
On Tuesday, CNN.com was serving about nine million page views an hour, compared with 14 million on a typical day, said spokeswoman Edna Johnson. By midday Wednesday, page views had jumped to a rate of 19 million an hour.
New Home Page
USA Today's Web team created a completely new home page specifically for the attack, said Susan Lavington, director of marketing for USAToday.com (www.usatoday.com). "We still don't have a handle on how much traffic we got [on Tuesday]. We know it was substantial, breaking all previous records, and it looks like [Wednesday] will be pretty much the same." She said the previous peak for the Gannett Co. site was almost 15 million page views on Nov. 8.
ABC's news Web site (www.abcnews.com) also couldn't provide detailed traffic data, but Steve Jones, executive producer and vice president of programming and operations, said the number of page views and unique users on Tuesday jumped as much as 600% from a typical day, and Wednesday's traffic was even higher.
The site benefited from being part of Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC; Mr. Jones said server capacity was redirected to ABCNews.com from two other Disney sites: ABC.com (www.abc.com) and sports site ESPN.com (www.espn.com).
Mr. Jones said demand for streaming video of ABC news coverage was at record levels, averaging 30,000 to 35,000 streams simultaneously from 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday through late Wednesday afternoon. To keep the video accessible, RealNetworks Inc., which hosts and streams the video for the site, used servers from canceled Major League Baseball coverage, Mr. Jones said.
He also noted that Wednesday traffic on ABCNews.com's message boards, at three million readers and posters, soared far above a typical day's 100,000 or so visits.
Somber Events
All four sites either removed advertising entirely or greatly reduced it following the attacks, in part to make the sites easier to access. Many ads contain graphics and other elements that slow downloads.
Also "given the somberness of yesterday's events," Mr. Jones said on Wednesday, "we decided [advertising] wasn't appropriate." He said ABCNews.com "will probably gradually move some ads back on, but we will be pretty selective where we put them." He said the decision on timing will be "based on our sense of the public mood."
Mr. Gelman said ads would likely return to CNN.com by Thursday afternoon, "as soon as we're completely confident that it's not going to impede our ability to serve [the site] to people who want the news and information."
As of late Wednesday afternoon, MSNBC was running limited advertising.
The Wall Street Journal Online continued running ads, but gave free access from 10 p.m. Tuesday to 6 p.m. Wednesday on certain parts of its site that usually require a subscription. Traffic data for the site weren't immediately available.
Temporarily removing ads from news venues such as television isn't unusual, said Michael Donahue, executive vice president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. "That's standard procedure when you've got an event of a lot less magnitude than this."
He said the sites may eventually benefit financially from the increased traffic even though they will lose some revenue in the short term. "Hopefully what happens is they get an enormous amount of tune-in -- as CNN [TV] did during the Gulf War -- and ultimately, once the news gets a little softer, they can intersperse ads while the is still relatively high." |
