Democratic Convention Web Site Gets 3.2 Million Visits

Ed: For prime time events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, party conventions - TV broadcast overwhelms online access. Stats below show less than 10% online view. Further, if we estimate 50% non-USA viewers, the domestic online share drops to less than 5%.

Democratic Convention Web Site Gets 3.2 Million Visits

Just as the Republican National Convention is about to wrap up tonight, the Democratic National Convention Committee released some interesting numbers about its web presence during the Democratic convention last week. During the convention week, the official Web site received more than 3.2 million visits. Also, visitors to the DNC site watched a total of more than 360,000 hours of online video from the convention.

SilverStripe

The convention site was built on top of SilverStripe, a New Zealand based open source content management system we reviewed last year. In the review, we noted that SilverStripe had great potential, especially for those who needed a CMS with more functionality than traditional blogging platforms, yet with less complexity than traditional CMS system. The fact that it worked so well under high load during the Democratic convention confirms our first impression.

SilverLight

Just like NBC did during the Olympics, the convention site used Microsoft's SliverLight platform to stream live and recorded video feeds, many of them in HD quality.

McCain speech's TV audience edges Obama's

By David B. Wilkerson, MarketWatch

Last update: 7:27 p.m. EDT Sept. 5, 2008

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Sen. John McCain's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night drew a total of more than 38.9 million viewers on eight television networks, surpassing the 38.3 million that tuned in for Sen. Barack Obama's address a week earlier, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.

McCain's address was seen live on ABC (DIS:

31.36, -0.18, -0.6%) CBS (CBS:

16.56, +0.38, +2.4%) , NBC (GE:

27.88, +0.18, +0.7%) (FR:012777: news,chart, profile) , CNN (TWX:

15.25, -0.21, -1.4%) , MSNBC, Univision, Telemundo and Fox News (NWS.A:

13.40, -0.25, -1.8%) (NWS:

13.76, -0.20, -1.4%) between 10 and 11:15 p.m. Eastern time.

It was also carried on PBS and C-SPAN, which weren't included in Nielsen's measurement.

The Republican presidential contender urged his party to "fight with me, fight for what's right for our country, fight for the ideals and character of a free people."See full story.

The audience share for McCain represented a nearly 5% improvement over the third night of the convention, when running mate Gov. Sarah Palin gave the GOP a jolt by attracting more than 37.2 million combined viewers on six networks for her acceptance speech.

McCain's nearly 39 million viewers also easily surpassed the 24 million viewers last week who watched the address by Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and the 26 million who saw Sen. Hillary Clinton's prime-time speech.

Thanks to the large audiences for McCain and Palin, the Republican National Convention averaged nearly 34.5 million viewers over three days, after the first night of the convention was canceled due to Hurricane Gustav.

The four nights of the Democratic National Convention garnered an average audience of more than 30.2 million, Nielsen said.

Although the Democratic convention typically outdraws the Republican convention, the past two election cycles have seen more viewers tune in for the GOP.

In 2004, the Republican convention drew an average of 22.6 million viewers, compared with 20.4 million for the Democrats.

In 2000, the Republican average was 19.2 million viewers, compared with 20.6 million for the Democrats.