The day after the 2006 midterm elections, MSNBC.com's unique visitors and page views skyrocketed to their highest levels in the last two years. Nearly 11 million unique users generated 75 million page views. This marks the highest day since the 2004 presidential elections for both page views and unique visitors. November 8 topped November 7 (Election Day) page views by 31% and unique visitors by 70%.
MSNBC.com's politics coverage (www.politics.msnbc.com) generated 36 million page views, nearly half of total site traffic for the day. Politics traffic peaked mid-day as news of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation broke but remained steady throughout the entire day.
Video streams from NBC News soared to nearly 5 million, the third highest day of the year behind only the death of Steve Irwin and the first pictures of Suri Cruise. High interest in the live stream of MSNBC TV featured on MSNBC.com all day drew 300,000 live streams. On-demand clips of the Donald Rumsfeld resignation announcement were popular with the top report alone generating 300,000 on-demand streams.
Traffic to "First Read" (www.firstread.msnbc.com), NBC News' political blog also remained high on Wednesday. With another 20 day-after election posts from NBC News political analysts, the blog generated nearly 400,000 page views throughout the day. The Democracy Dashboard, with real-time results including a map with state-by-state results and returns on Senate, House and gubernatorial races also attracted 400,000 page views.