Wall Street Debacle Nets Record Traffic to Redesigned WSJ.com

Like so many disasters which have driven news consumption, the earthquake that hit Wall Street on Monday has brought record traffic to the Wall Street Journal Online.  Monday set an all time record of two million visitors, a Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high, we are told.  These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million, according to internal Dow Jones numbers.   

The huge traffic spiked coincided with the the site's redesign which was launched on Monday. 

Peter Kafka over at Silicon Alley Insider writes about the reasons and expectations around the redesign.

Over the past few weeks, online news traffic has been soaring, according to a report by Jennifer Saba in Editor & Publisher published yesterday.  The Huffington Post is on fire, up nearly 300 percent.  The presidential campaign, hurricanes and now financial disaster seem to be good news for the news business.

For much more on the Wall Street Journal's redesign and the upheaval on Wall Street, tomorrow I am interviewing Alan Murray, Executive Editor of the WSJ.com.  We plan to post our interview tomorrow afternoon. Please check back.

Update:  We just posted about record-breaking traffic at NYTimes.com

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer