Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Times smash records on election day

It was a high-voltage day for the Internet. I only have stats for a few sites, but rest assured that records were broken all over the place. Personally, I can't remember more than a few minutes (when I went to vote, e.g.) when I didn't have my laptop open, the better to surf around furiously with.

Twitter obliterated its own usage records. According to Biz Stone, the site's co-founder, Twitter's peak messaging rate (measured in messages per second) was 2-3 times higher than the previous record rate, set during the first presidential debate.

"People turn to Twitter during shared, real-time events—these debates and this election was so massively shared that Twitter benefited from huge increases in both activity and exposure," Stone wrote in an e-mail.

Digg also reported its highest traffic day ever.  Leading the charge was the "Digg this if you voted for Obama" post, which scored a massive 33,000 diggs, making it the most-Dugg post in 365 days, and the second most-Dugg post ever. (The first is this famous one where site founder Kevin Rose addresses the leak of the HD-DVD key). Not surprisingly, Digg's politics section was the most popular area on the site.

At YouTube, the Video Your Vote project netted close to 1,500 videos from across the nation, many of them on Tuesday.  That blazing submission rate would seem to leave any of YouTube's previous community projects in the dust, according to this statement sent to me by a YouTube spokesperson:

"The CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate was open for submissions for two months and we received 3,000
questions. The CNN/YouTube Republican Debate was open for five months and we received 5,000 questions. Video Your Vote was open for submissions for a week and we received, in a period of one day, around 1,200 submissions."

The Los Angeles Times web site broke its all-time page view record with 8.36 million, beating a year-old record.

Comments

[Rob W]

While watching the election coverage on NBC last night, twitter was mentioned. I was shocked and amazed. This is such a great communication tool, I just didn't think that it was so mainstream.

[Daniel]

Rob - Twitter's definitely gaining more and more popularity. Just look at Rick Sanchez on CNN.

[David Gerard]

Wikipedia also had its highest traffic day ever, the site falling over at one time as the high traffic exposed a bug in the system configuration. (Not in fact sheer overload!)

[Andrew]

CNN broke records too.

[Karikuy]

Im glad interactive websites are gaining more publicity. I run a modern flash site which is the kind I wish more websites would make especially sites like facebook and digg. This election was great at introducing new technology into the media. Way to Go! I gotta say I spent most of my time on Nov 4th on the internet checking out websites.

[mallchin]

"I run a modern flash site which is the kind I wish more websites would make especially sites like facebook and digg."

Flash? Noooo!

BTW what is your site?

[erichansa]

I kept refreshing every few minutes to see how fast the articles were getting dugg.

[ntopics]

When I saw the real time polling I went
through all of the states, and did it over and over
during the day. I can see why that site has
huge popularity.

Thanks from tony

[Real Happiness]

You could feel the pressure buckling on diggs servers. It's a sign of the times.

Younger audiences are flocking the the internet for instant updates and news, and it was a great sign that people care. That more people are voting, more are interested in politics - and it wasn't just limited to the US - people fomr around the world.

[Rob Scott]

There are some big numbers there! 8.36 million pageviews ain't half bad. Well done LA Times - my favorite US news website !

[Matt]

Also check out this new Twitter tracker called Fresh Squeezed Tweets- http://anorangeamerica.com/
We rolled this out for Tropicana just as the polls opened on election morning at New Media Strategies.
It pulls Tweets in real time, crunches the numbers and displays the connections between conversations with some pretty cool graphics. Election may be over, but its got some fascinating stuff there to look at, especially now. Give it a look...