Starr report could be most-read Web item ever
The Kenneth Starr report on President Clinton's sexual peccadilloes continued to drive Netizens to the Web in huge numbers throughout the weekend.
One pollster, Luntz Research Cos., said Monday that the report may have drawn 20 million Americans, more eyeballs than any other single item ever posted to the Web.
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One Web tracking firm showed lower numbers, but noted "the frenzy to see the Starr report is like nothing we've ever seen before," said Jeff Levy, chief executive officer at Relevant Knowledge Inc., in an interview.
RelevantKnowledge found that some 6.4 million people accessed the Starr report on major news sites, government sites and portal sites between Friday and Sunday, out of a total of 24.7 million Americans who went onto the Internet during the two days. Luntz meanwhile, surveyed 800 Americans over two days, and extrapolated its number of 20 million American (15 percent of U.S. men and 8 percent of U.S. women) accessed the Starr report online Friday and Saturday. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
E-mail a big factor
RelevantKnowledge's Levy said Web traffic overall "took a huge jump" this weekend from the previous weekend, largely due to interest in the scandal. But even as the report worked its way further into the public consciousness via sites of all descriptions, many Netizens probably read all they were going to read of the 445-page document in snippets e-mailed to them by their friends, he said.
"Nobody looks at e-mail as a factor" in the distribution of news, Levy said.
There's no way of measuring how many people got their main glimpse of the report via e-mail. But, since it was posted on a weekday afternoon, it's likely that workers surfing for naughty bits passed them along to tens of thousands of others who didn't directly access the report online, he said.
Claim and counterclaim
RelevantKnowledge also released a list of its estimates for news site traffic to the report, which in many cases conflict with the sites' own estimates.
While MSNBC said its posting of the report drew 1.9 million unique users on Friday, 864,000 on Saturday and 696,000 on Sunday, Relevant Knowledge's estimates show just over 1 million people accessed the report on MSNBC over the three days.
Across all the news sites it surveyed, 10 times more Netizens accessed the Starr site than the text of Clinton's lawyers' rebuttal, RelevantKnowledge officials said.
Regardless of the exact numbers, evidence from news sites does bear out the enormous demand for access to the report.
At CNN Interactive, which has seen its traffic records fall with increasing speed of late, new records were reached again this weekend, officials said. The news site claimed 34.26 million page views on Friday, a record which surpassed the previous peaks from Aug. 31's stock market woes and the Aug. 17 apology by Clinton for his extramarital affair, said Kerrin Roberts, public relations manager for the site.
The site drew 15 million page views Saturday and 12.7 million on Sunday, roughly double the normal weekend average, Roberts said in an interview. CNN Interactive officials did not break out the percentage of traffic that went to the report, which it claims to have posted at 2:45 p.m. ET Friday, before any other news site, but Roberts said it's safe to assume the bulk of the traffic went to the report. To prepare for the onslaught, five extra servers were added, he said.
Government Web sites suffered
Keynote Systems, an Internet backbone performance measurement company, said that 48 percent of the attempts to access the report on official government sites failed Friday and Saturday, while 12 percent of the attempts at CNN Interactive failed. At the New York Times site, 4 percent of attempts failed. Just 1 percent of attempts to access the report at the Wall Street Journal and USA Today sites failed, according to Keynote Systems officials.
The Internet Traffic Report Web site reported Monday that Internet speed for users connecting in New York City and Washington was particularly slow over the weekend due to the gridlock created by the Starr report.