Yahoo News Is Bracing for a Day of Heavy Traffic

By BRIAN STELTER

Published: November 2, 2008

The festive red, white and blue graphics have been designed. The production rehearsals have been held. The Web servers have been adjusted in preparation for a great influx of traffic. Now Yahoo News is waiting for the election results to start streaming in.

Yahoo News, by some measures one of the most popular news Web sites in the country, has repeatedly broken its own traffic records during the election year. The news arm of the search engine expects Tuesday’s day of voting and Wednesday’s day-after to raise the bar higher still.

“Yahoo has taken its place as the great starting point for any big event,” said Neeraj Khemlani, the vice president for programming and development.

With an increasing number of people using the Internet for news, sites like Yahoo are treating election night as a prime programming occasion, the way the television networks do.

Web sites have introduced and refined new ways to track the election, from multiple streams of live video to real-time graphics of voting patterns. Perhaps the most significant innovations are the interactive maps of state-by-state polls and potential Electoral College outcomes. On Yahoo, users of the “Political Dashboard” spend an average of 10 minutes constructing red- and blue-state outcome and seeing how they match up to prior elections.

Web sites “put the data in the hands of the audience,” said Liz Lufkin, senior director for front page content. “You can see John King playing around with his groovy map on CNN, but you can do something similar on Yahoo.”

On Tuesday the election will dominate Yahoo’s home page. Users who search for terms like “Barack Obama” and “John McCain” will see links to Yahoo’s news and results at the top of the results.

Most of the material on Yahoo News comes from The Associated Press and third-party partners like ABC News and The Politico. Yahoo will simulcast the coverage of ABC News Now, the digital video arm of ABC News, which plans to go live from 7 p.m. until at least 11 p.m. The site will rely on The A.P.’s projections of winners in each state; its breaking news blog will acknowledge when the television networks make projections.

Helped by interest in the election, Yahoo News had 38 million visitors in September, according to Nielsen Online. Although Yahoo News usually ranks No. 1 in Nielsen’s list of online news outlets, MSNBC.com’s network of sites surpassed Yahoo in September with 43.2 million visitors. CNN.com’s network ranked third with 37.3 million visitors. (Another firm, comScore, placed Yahoo ahead of MSNBC.com for the same month.)

While television news has viewership spikes on major campaign days, news sites usually have bigger bumps the day after. “Prime time on the Internet is first thing in the morning,” Ms. Lufkin said. Aug. 29, the day after Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, was the highest traffic day in the 13-year history of Yahoo News, according to the site’s internal data, which recorded a 446 percent increase above normal days.

August had already been good to Yahoo. During the Olympics, Yahoo News drew more visitors than NBC’s site, even though NBC owned exclusive video rights to the Summer Games. By the end of September, Yahoo News had doubled the amount of traffic it had in all of 2004, according to internal data.

The site had 80 million page views on election day in 2004 and 142 million the day after, when John Kerry conceded to George W. Bush. “We expect to do twice and perhaps three times as much traffic in 2008,” Mr. Khemlani said.