With last Wednesdays’s announcement that Pope Francis would be succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, the internet went into a frenzy. Pope Benedict XVI will forever have the distinction of being the first Pope to join Twitter. Soon after he stepped down, Benedict’s tweets from @Pontifex were taken down, as the account was transferred to Francis. Today, Francis sent his first tweet.
Dear friends, I thank you from my heart and I ask you to continue to pray for me.Pope Francis.
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) March 17, 2013
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One of the biggest beneficiaries of the Pope Francis announcement was CNN.com, the world’s 80th most visited website according to Alexa.com. To see how much of an effect a major world news story have on a leading website’s traffic, here are some of CNN’s record-breaking numbers from Wednesday:
CNN.com’s domestic site posted:
- 10.7 million uniques – the highest day of 2013 with 450K more visitors than Feb. 12 (SOTU/Dorner manhunt)
- 68.3 million page views, the second-highest day of the year
- 5.6 million video starts, the second-highest day of the year
- 1.4 million live streams – the highest day of the year, topping the previous record of 750K live streams (Inauguration on Jan. 21st)
- Six of the day’s top 10 stories were related to CNN’s coverage of the pope.
- (Source: Omniture, March 13, 2013)
Mobile usage on the domestic site also saw a significant boost for the day:
- 12.7 million page views, the second-highest day of the year
- Video starts were 103% higher than the benchmark with live video accounting for 61% of total video plays.
- (Source: Bango Analytics, March 13, 2013)