- Mike Shields, Mediaweek

NEW YORK Americans cruised the Internet in massive numbers on Nov. 4 to track the conclusion of the presidential race, which yielded historic online audience numbers for several major news sites, according to figures released by Nielsen Online.

The news category’s traditional leaders CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Yahoo News each enjoyed banner traffic days, per Nielsen. CNN reached 12.9 million unique users on Nov. 4, an increase of 51 percent versus the previous Tuesday, when interest in the election was already high. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s digital audience more than doubled week-to-week, hitting 12.1 million uniques on Election Day. (Related: "Obama Win Sets Viewing Records.")

Yahoo News’ audience climbed to 11.4 million users on Tuesday, an increase of 50 percent compared to Oct. 28. And the surging FoxNews.com -- which has seen its Web audience grow considerably during this presidential campaign season -- reached 5.7 million uniques, up 46 percent versus one-week prior.

Washingtonpost.com exhibited the highest week-over-week growth, as its user base soared by 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques.

Overall, Nielsen found that from Oct. 28 to Nov. 4, traffic swelled by 27 percent in the online news category as a whole, with page views more than doubling and time spent increasing by 61 percent.

Beyond Nielsen’s third party data, both CNN.com and MSNBC.com executives are reporting much larger traffic gains based on internal data. CNN.com claims to have reached a staggering 30 million unique users on Election Day, an increase of 123 percent versus the previous record -- Super Tuesday of this year.

Similarly, MSNBC.com is reporting monster numbers for Nov. 4, which execs say is now the highest trafficked day in the site’s 12-year history. MSNBC.com reported 250 million page views -- double Election Day in 2004 -- and over 20 million unique visitors.

Adweek is a unit of the Nielsen Co.