'06 Election Coverage: High Election Night Traffic onTV Station Sites

TV station site network Internet Broadcasting put out some election-fueled traffic numbers today. Apparently, lots of folks were glued to the Web last night as election results streamed in, and they were flocking to news sites like those in the IB network, which includes 79 sites from NBC, Cox Television, Hearst-Argyle, The McGraw Hill Companies, Post-Newsweek, and Meredith Broadcasting.

Here are some stats, according to WebTrends data gathered for the publishing outfit:
– 3.5 million unique visitors went to the network’s sites (the company’s highest day in history, it claims).
– The sites’ political sections garnered almost three times the number of page views as they did in the night of the ’04 presidential election: 4.8 million.
– The sites received almost 50 percent more page views in total than last election night: 24.8 million.
– The network’s top sites grabbed 50-150 percent more traffic than usual last night.

To add a bit of anecdotal affirmation to this, I attended an election night shindig hosted by a political media consulting firm last night, and a whole lotta political junkies had their laptops open, perusing the real-time online coverage.