Tuesday was a big day for pageviews on The New York Times website, of course. But get this: Wednesday was even bigger.

Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at the Times, offered that intriguing tidbit in a memo to staff this morning. He wrote:

Based on past experience, we expected less traffic the day after Inauguration Day than on Inauguration Day itself. We expected wrong. On the day after, we had nearly 49 million pageviews, 25 percent more than on Inauguration Day and the third highest day ever in terms of pageviews.

Visits, however, were down slightly from the day before, at 8.3 million.

That’s interesting. Fewer people visited nytimes.com but they looked at more pages. In fact, they set a record, clicking on 5.8 pageviews per visit, up from 4.7 on Inauguration Day and 40% higher than our usual average of around 4.4. (The second highest day in for pageviews per visit came last week, when the US Airways flight landed in the Hudson.)

Call it the Day-After Effect. Plenty has been written about the huge demand for live streaming video of the festivities on Tuesday, but there was obviously a strong demand for inauguration content long after the event itself. How did the Times take advantage of it? By letting readers relive the moment with copious photographs.

Landman reports that 11 million of the nearly 49 million pageviews on Wednesday went to slideshows. One slideshow of the inaugural balls generated 2.7 million pagesviews alone that day. A slideshow of the ceremony garnered 900,000, and another one took in 800,000. Other multimedia took in an additional 5 million pageviews. Staggering numbers that made January 21 — not the 20th — the biggest day for pageviews per visit in nytimes.com history.