Sites make right
Keeping things simple helped the Web traffic its record levels of election-night news coverage and numbers
By Ken Kerschbaumer -- Broadcasting & Cable, 11/12/2000 7:00:00 PM
As election night decided to make a week of it, visitors swamped news-related Web sites last week checking out poll numbers and news from Florida.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 6.2 million viewers visited CNN.com from their workplace on Nov. 7 and Nov. 8. MSNBC.com brought in 5.1 million, and ABCNews.com brought in 2.1 million. The traffic numbers are a little less than double the total home audience.
With such large amounts of traffic, the challenge for the technical teams at the news sites was to figure out how to optimize their infrastructure to handle the load.
"Based on the 1996 election growth, we expected a five-fold increase in traffic," explains Monty Mulling, senior vice president of Internet technologies, Turner Broadcasting Systems. "Our peak in 1996 was 5 million page views for all the sites, but today we average 30-35 million page views per day."
According to Media Metrix, CNN had 100 million page impressions on Election Day and then was bumped up to 150 million on Nov. 8, when things got crazier.
CNN began building out its server architecture earlier this year and had the election traffic in mind. CNN currently has about 120 servers handling advertising and other components of the site. About 80 of those are on the frontlines, making it possible for visitors to visit. "Our capacity has been increased by seven times," adds Mulling.
A tactic used by the sites is to make the pages themselves "flatter" so that there is less information that needs to be sent to viewers' computers. That makes access to the pages faster, and that can make the difference between keeping and losing visitors.
"We went to flat content to handle the higher loads," says Steve White, chief technology officer for MSNBC.com. "When we designed the site, we kept asking ourselves what would happen if we got hammered with traffic. So all the pages were designed flat, without database hits. We tried our damnedest to make it a hammer-proof site."
Despite all the precautions, there were the occasional traffic inundations among the sites. But even in those instances, CNN implemented a plan designed to allow CNN to lower the demands even further with lighter and lighter pages.
"Our election pages were designed lighter to start with, less than half the load size of our average pages," adds Scott Woelfel, president and editor in chief of CNNInteractive. "But we also had the pages available in smaller increments so we could cut the size in half again if we saw the traffic reach a certain point."
Traffic congestion aside, one of the big issues on the Internet was the disclosure of polling data earlier in the day. The Drudge Report was at the center of the controversy, as Matt Drudge promised to make exit-poll data from Voters News Service and other sources available as soon as he received it. But his Web site was so clogged with traffic that getting to the information proved difficult, if not impossible.
The television sites, however, maintained their silence on releasing exit-poll information while polls were still open. "We don't leave our journalistic principles behind just because of the competition," says Woelfel. "It's more than a gentlemen's agreement. For one thing, exit polls aren't a useful statistic early in the race."
Adds White, "We can't be Drudge or whatever he thinks he wants to be. If we did, we wouldn't have the audience we have, an audience that demands there are standards we stick to. Drudge fills a particular role in society, but I don't think the average citizen wants their news to follow suit."
Numbers on demand/Did you visit one of these sites Tuesday night? Well, you weren't alone.
| Broadcast news site | Unique visitors |
|---|---|
|
CNN.com |
3,516,000 |
|
MSNBC.com |
2,643,000 |
|
ABCNews.com |
1,205,000 |
|
CBSNews.com |
341,000 |
|
FoxNews.com |
511,000 |
|
Source: Media Metrix |
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