As everyone in the world, including those who live under rocks (Osama Bin Laden perhaps) will know by now, Barack Obama won the 2008 U.S. election to become the 44th President of the United States of America. And his victory seems to have prompted record Web traffic to news sites all over the world.

On Nov. 3, I wrote an article explaining how even though I was a Brit and therefore not technically involved in the Presidential race at all, I was still supremely interested in the outcome of the election. As it was, I finished work early and watched seven hours of coverage, both on television and on the Web, right up until Obama gave his acceptance speech at 6am UK time.

I clearly wasn’t alone in wanting to savor every single moment of this historic event, as Web traffic to news sites reportedly hit a record high of 8.5 million global visitors per minute at 11 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. CNet reports how Akamai’s Net Usage Index recorded the huge spike, the largest ever since the company began monitoring Internet traffic in 2005.

The previous record was set when Ghana knocked the United States out of the 2006 World Cup. The trend seems to be for sporting events to dominate proceedings so this election leapfrogged them all to hit the top spot.

What’s interesting is that most of the rest of the peak traffic moments have occurred during the middle of the workday when people access sites via their company’s computers in order to keep up to date. This peak happened in the evening when people were already home, which shows how much of an influence the Internet is having on our lives. People seem to now be turning to the Web as an alternative to regular television news coverage.

CNN is just one of the sites monitored by Akamai, but the news media company also reports hitting a new record for traffic. Beet.tv reports that “CNN.com attracted more than 27 million unique visitors” during the course of election day, which is the highest figure ever achieved. The live news streams on the site were viewed by 4.9 million people, triple the previous record.

The Web may not have broken due to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election but traffic seems to have been up across the board. News websites now have four years to prepare for the next onslaught when Barack Obama will be defending his Presidency against a possibly resurgent Republican party. If Sarah Palin runs, then expect another historic battle with high turnouts and worldwide interest.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1:32 am under Internet, Opinion, Politics, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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