Obama Victory Creates Historic Global Demand for Web Content

As the world watched the U.S. campaign coverage and the Obama victory speech on computers seven hours ago, demand for news content hit a historic record, according to data from Akamai, the Cambridge, Massachusetts provider of global web content distribution for CNN, NBC, the BBC, Reuters and many others others.

Akamai registered a record 8.5 million "global visitors per minute" at 11:00 P.M EST last night.  The previous record of 7.2 million was set in June 2006 for the World Cup, company data shows.  8:30 a.m. update: Here's statement provided to Beet.TV by an Akamai spokesperson:

"We believe the information that is communicated by this Net Usage Index for News is an important measurement tool for showing the Internet's pervasive role in our day-to-day lives.  Yesterday's Election Night coverage generated the highest peak in global Web traffic -- to a collective set of leading online news sites -- that we have seen since launching the index in August of 2005.  We expect Web traffic levels to also be high today as people continue to follow this historic event."

Meanwhile at CNN.com, traffic broke records too.  Here's a statement from a CNN spokesperson emailed to Beet.TV earlier this morning:

"On Election Day, CNN.com attracted more than 27 million unique visitors – the highest in the site’s history. Further, CNN.com Live – the Internet’s only live, multi-stream video news service – broke all previous records serving an impressive 4.9 million live streams, nearly tripling its previous traffic record. CNN.com also generated more than 276 million page views and served an additional 6.7 million on-demand video streams on Nov. 4."

Yesterday afternoon, I interviewed CNN.com's Susan Grant about the record traffic. While I was in the CNN newsroom, I interviewed special correspondent Soledad O'Brien. 

2:36 p.m. update: Msnbc.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served 9 million video streams on election day, shattering site records, the company just announced.

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

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