Election night post-mortem

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Election night post-mortem

We noted yesterday that Rich Miller had predicted trouble on election night for sites like FiveThirtyEight that hosted on free/cheap sites like Blogger. Well, score one for Rich — FiveThirtyEight was noticeably slower than its peers all night long, earning this rebuke from the site’s Sean Quinn:

One does wonder why Blogger’s owner Google, of all people, is consistently unable to handle large surges of traffic. It’s always so sad to see a news site’s servers struggle with the moments that should be their finest: when the whole world descends.

Also note that, as one might have predicted, last night broke the all-time record for most traffic to online news sites. The peak moment: Right at 11 p.m. EST, when the networks declared it for Obama.

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Mark Coddington February 10, 2012

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Jeremy Dunck

Blogger is Google’s red-headed stepchild.

I don’t think it’s been seriously worked on since it was acquired in 2003. OK, there have been some tweaks.

But consider that 538 didn’t have a lot of revenue prior to the spike, and that they basically handled the spike on a near-free account without any need of servers or engineering.

(FWIW, clicking publish in frustration repeatedly almost certainly made the problem worse.)
http://narrativedigest.org Andrea

It looked like 538 had a big revenue rush once Nate S. started getting a lot of big media appearances back in September. Their ad count seemed to jump in the two months before the election.

Since Silver is trying to keep the site going AFTER the election, I bet any real advertisers are going to want guarantees that he won’t crash during other peak traffic moments (tho’ it’s hard to imagine he’ll the same kind of numbers after, say, a rowdy Senate filibuster or an off-year Congressional race).

So I bet he’ll have to pony up the cash to go outside the Blogger model and keep 538 in business in the long run…
Bart

I believe 538.com was (at least in the month or two prior to November 4) the highest-volume site on Blogger. That’s no doubt not true now, while the site is being reprogrammed.

One might think that the fact that the owner of 538.com and a co-founter of Google (Larry Page) both went to the same high school (several years apart) might get Google to invest in keeping 538 and using that marquee site to promote Blogger.

Tags: FiveThirtyEight, web hosting

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