Tuesday proved, as expected, to be one of busiest days in history for Web traffic. And of the sites competing for the honor of Inauguration Day’s most-visited…an old standby won the day. Per the AP,
The CNN Digital Network was the no. 1 online destination among current events and global news sites, according to the research firm Nielsen Online. It had 11 million unique visitors on Tuesday when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president.
The MSNBC Digital Network followed with 10 million unique visitors and Yahoo! News took the No. 3 spot with 9.1 million. Rounding out the top five was the Fox News Digital Network and AOL News.
CNN, interesting, had partnered with Facebook to supply status updates from people’s Facebook friends on its site–which possibly (hey, likely) accounted for its edge-out of MSNBC. And during the height of Inaugural events, in particular, CNN proved popular. Again per the AP, CNN.com “said it served more than 21.3 million streams globally that day between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. EST. — the most in its history by far.”
Compare that to the AP, which on Tuesday provided comparatively few live video streams through its two-year-old Online Video Network. But…comparatively few: though the network failed to break the top five sites in traffic, the videos it streamed still numbered about 8 million.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.