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Election brings BBC News record web traffic

By Oliver Luft

The BBC News website had its highest ever weekday audience on Friday as 11.4m users accessed the site for minute-by-minute updates on the election.

The total surpassed the previous record of 9.2m visitors achieved on 5 November, the day of the Barack Obama victory in the US presidential election.

The BBC said its internal figures – which are not independently verified – showed around 30m page views for the constituency results pages and about 6.5m page views to the election live page as a total of over 100m BBC News web pages were viewed the day after the election.

In addition to users reading text, the BBC said around nine million requests were received by the BBC News website to view videos. The corporation’s mobile election results page had more than one million page views.

The BBC said its “search for your result by postcode” feature peaked at around 36,000 searches per minute, with the “search by name” function peaking with a similar number.

Saturday also proved to be a record-breaker as 5.7m users accessed the BBC News site, the highest ever for a single day at the weekend – a further five million users visited the site on Sunday.

Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News Online, said: “We had very close collaboration with newsgathering, fast reporting right down to local level from across the Nations and English Regions and live video streams of all the key moments and programmes.

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“Among the key elements that did well online were the daily live page coverage, the innovative and detailed interactive explainers created by the News website specials team and the unrivalled multi-platform results maps and graphics on the special election site.”

National newspaper websites will reveal how the election affected their daily web traffic next month which the publication of the Audit Bureau of Circulations multi-platform report.

On TV, a peak audience of 6.6m watched David Dimbleby anchor Election 2010 on BBC One, BBC HD, BBC News Channel and on BBC Two in the nations, with an average audience of 4.7m, 36.1 per cent of the viewing public.

ITV News coverage of the election on ITV1 drew an average of 1.2m, an audience share of 9.6 per cent, while Sky News averaged 384,000 viewers for its coverage.

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