msnbc.com talks about election night consumer behavior

Election Day in the US last month was an event that truly showed the transformation of the Internet as a viable news and entertainment channel. Much has been written about this (including these insights from VideoNuze), and at Limelight Networks we were proud to have worked with the major news networks to stream their election night coverage online.

We sat down with one of our customers, msnbc.com, to learn more about the behavior of their site visitors throughout the campaign period and as election night results unfolded.

Q: We saw both campaigns be particularly aggressive in their use of the Internet to educate the electorate. Did msnbc.com notice a more “Internet-savvy” user coming to its site? Did the type of user evolve over the length of the campaign (i.e. from “political junkies” early on to a more general user on election night, or from basic user to more sophisticated?
We’ve been successful because the site offers “a fuller spectrum of news.”  There’s something on msnbc.com for everyone – from the political novice to the political junkie. Msnbc.com’s expansive election coverage featured original journalism, exclusive multimedia features, live votes, interactive maps that revealed results down to the county level, and world-class reporting and video from NBC News and MSNBC Cable.  Msnbc.com created innovative tools on the “Decision ‘08 Dashboard” (www.politics.msnbc.com) that empowered our users by providing compelling resources they wanted to surface news in meaningful ways.  For example, our “Decision ‘08” election widget, which received more than 16 million page views during election week, enabled consumers to get live feeds of coverage across the Web.
Our election coverage and innovative offerings across all platforms engaged consumers and drove the site to record-shattering numbers -  nearly 250 million page views and over 20 million unique visitors - the site’s highest traffic day in its 12 year history for both page views and unique visitors.  According to Nielsen Online, msnbc.com was number one in total minutes and time per person on election day, which illustrates the site’s ability to engage users better than any other news site

Q: Specifically on Election Night, how did you link online experience with the broadcast coverage? What experiences were you able to create online that weren’t possible on TV?
Msnbc.com continued to see explosive growth in online video, with total video streams during the week of the election surging to over 40 million streams.  Msnbc.com was able to stream all-day live election coverage of MSNBC TV on November 4 – a special feature on the site on election day – and users averaged 42 minutes per live stream session.  Consumers also turned to the site to watch the latest news, including President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech, which generated over 2 million live and on-demand streams.
Q: Did you notice any trends in your audience’s behavior during election night — Were they on the site longer than usual? Did they consume more video?  Was there a lot of research occurring?

Msnbc.com attracted huge number of unique visitors – more than 20 million, in fact – on election day.  We also saw that users were engaged with the content and spending a lot of time on the site.  On November 4, msnbc.com beat CNN.com by 28% in time per person, with nearly 13.5 minutes per user compared to 10.5 minutes for CNN.com.  Consumers also turned to msnbc.com for next day insight and analysis on election results.  On November 5, msnbc.com had the biggest post-election audience with 11.5 million unique visitors according to Nielsen Online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 7:46 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.