US election sparks 27% surge in news website traffic
Thursday, 06, Nov 2008 10:38
Traffic to news websites soared by 27 per cent on US election day (November 4th) compared with a week ago, according to new figures.
Released by Nielsen Online, the statistics showed that almost 42.4 million American web users visited a news site on Tuesday, up from nearly 33.5 million last week.
Page views soared by 103 per cent to reach 868.3 million, while the average amount of time spent on news sites per person came to 19 minutes and 51 seconds compared with 12 minutes and 22 seconds in the previous week.
CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo! News topped the list of the most visited news sites, followed by Fox News, AOL News, the New York Times and Google News.
"In the finale of the first truly digital presidential campaign, with a record turnout of more than 136 million Americans casting votes, voters flocked online to follow news and election results and to play with electoral college math," Nielsen Online said in a statement.
Recent figures from comScore showed that UK traffic to political websites increased by 27 per cent during September, thanks to growing interest in the US election.