The New York Times is celebrating this week after they managed to survive their biggest ever onslaught of traffic – 9 million page views in two hours.
The visitors arrived after an article about houses in unfortunate locations was featured on the Yahoo homepage, sending a staggering 7,300 hits per second and 4,9 million page views in the first hour.
Apparently the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue because the page didn’t have any premium advertisers but the NY Times is happy enough and is praising the web developers for keeping the site running when most would have crashed.
An internal memo has the full details:
Links from other sites generate traffic to ours. Usually this happens incrementally, a little here, a little there, adding up over time. Every once in awhile, though, it comes with a rush you can almost hear, causing wild traffic spikes at the most unexpected moments.
On Thursday afternoon, Yahoo put a link in the “Featured†box at the top of their home page to this Home and Garden story. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/garden/18houses.html
In an instant, traffic to our site nearly tripled, breaking a couple of records: nearly 7,300 hits per second and 4.9 million page views for the hour in which the spike occurred, then 4.2 million in the following hour. That’s higher than anything we saw during the 2008 election campaigns, when the previous records were set.
It’s at moments like this when our technology is put to the test, along with the developers who build and maintain it. To their great credit, everything worked brilliantly.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Presumably the NYT web developers are now feverishly working on real-time monitoring and new ad contracts to react to such spikes by moving premium ads onto the affected pages. Sometimes traffic can be predicted (election coverage, celebrity deaths, etc), but they also need to be able to capture revenue from the unexpected traffic.
More comments from dgentryFind me on Twitter
Call me anal (actually, dont) but unless ” 7,300 hits per second” was just the highest number rather than an average, then it doesn’t equate to 4.9 million hits an hour, more like 26 million hits.
I think someone misread a ‘1′ for a ‘7′.
1,300 hits per second is more like it.
More comments from DavidFind me on Facebook | StumbleUpon | Twitter
I would be happy to suffer such a fate!
More comments from notjohnchowGreat new for New York Times. Sadly though, they have no avenues to monetize this traffic figure. I just wonder what would I have done with that traffic.
That must be some serious hardware they are packing. Lots of traffic but probably completely useless.
More comments from HubtonomyFind me on Facebook | Twitter
I think they happy from the adsense ads in this page, site like nytimes.com must to contend with alot of traffic so it’s ok…
More comments from seojobsGreat news for NY Times. Like to subscribe your RSS. Best of luck
More comments from Cash-AdvanceFind me on Digg | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter
This is amazing. I think i should also use the same strategy for my website.
More comments from counselinggeraera
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9 million page views in 2 hours from 1 link: The New York Times is celebrating this week after they managed to s.. http://tinyurl.com/moao24
9 million page views in 2 hours from 1 link http://tinyurl.com/moao24
RT@RobBothanRT@patrickaltoft:9million page views in 2 hours from 1 link:The New York Times is celebrating http://tinyurl.com/moao24
9 million page views in 2 hours from 1 link http://tinyurl.com/moao24 RT @patrickaltoft via @tweetmeme
votre site web pourrait-il supporter la charge de 5 millions de pages vues en 1h comme le NYT ? http://tinyurl.com/moao24
Le site du NYT a supporté une charge de 5 M de PV en 1h en prov. d’une box en home de Yahoo US http://tinyurl.com/moao24 (via @webrankinfo)
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