Why did CNN’s web site dominate inauguration coverage? Facebook Connect?

January 23, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

CNN’s web site had the attention of more than four percent of U.S. web users when it streamed President Barack Obama’s inauguration live on Tuesday, according to a Compete traffic report today — much higher than rival Fox, CBS and MSNBC’s traffic combined. Why?

Maybe it was because CNN’s site was already much more popular, as you can see from the Compete traffic graph. Since most people already visited CNN’s web site for online news, its where they told their friends to go.

However, many of us were impressed by CNN’s integration of Facebook Connect (even though the video wasn’t perfect). Maybe that service’s success had something to do with the traffic increase? It basically lets you chat with your friends on Facebook while watching the inauguration on CNN, repurposing Facebook status updates feature into a real-time threaded chat service. Facebook said that more than 1.5 million status messages were generated on the CNN site that day. See screenshot below.

One way that Connect may have driven traffic to CNN is that the chat messages appeared within user profiles and on news feeds on Facebook, so friends would see that you were watching the inauguration and go chat with you on CNN. Of course, Facebook and CNN both advertised the service beforehand, so that certainly affected overall usage. We don’t have detailed numbers to help us sort out why CNN’s traffic was so much higher than rivals during the inauguration, but it could be an early indicator of where Connect is going.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Valid points, but what do you think of this? The traffic bump in relative terms actually shows a whole different story. By visual inspection:

    1. CNN: 2.75 -> 4 => +45%
    2. Foxnews: .75 -> 1.1 => +47%
    3. CBS & MSNBC: .2 -> .35 => +75%
  • Compete's blog post mentioned that. I don't think it's too interesting because the other sites were much smaller and saw less absolute growth in their shares of web traffic.
  • Amazing that 1.5 million attended the inauguration. And I heard that 21 missed work.
  • Facebook User
    I know I watched on CNN via Facebook Connect because I was invited by fb friends. Being able to comment live with friends across the country was really cool. Everyone really liked the setup and I'd like to see more use of this app.