Spitzer story crashes NYTimes.com
Michael Gay March 10th, 2008
The big story today that the NY Times broke about the NY Governor and a prostitution ring apparently caused the site to crash under the traffic, according to a spokesperson from the paper in response to the Huffington Post. According to the paper, the site has crashed two other times: 9/11/2001 and the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Queens.
15 Comments Add your own
1. Cee | March 10th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
ahh, the power of drudge.
2. Drew | March 10th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Wasn’t Drudge that made me try the NYT site over and over. Or the Albany Times Union (also crashed). It never ever occurred to me to try WABC, WCBS,r WNBC or any NYC television site. But the cameras were there on 3rd Avenue waiting for the perp walk from the governors office. Needless to say no news was made by TV reporters on the street.
3. Anonymous | March 10th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
HuffPo gets more page views than Drudge, and is currently tied in reach, according to Alexa.
www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/huffingtonpost.com?range=1y&site0=huffingtonpost.com&site1=drudgereport.com&y=p&z=0#entireGraph
Even Daily Kos has more page views than Drudge.
www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/dailykos.com?range=1y&site0=dailykos.com&site1=drudgereport.com&y=p&z=0#entireGraph
Drudge has been on a loooooong-term downtrend, while HuffPo (and Daily Kos) is on the way up. (Alexa isn’t perfect, but comScore and Nielsen//Netratings are also unreliable.)
4. Anonymous | March 10th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
PS: As Cory knows, there’s a problem in putting URLs with an ampersand in the URL field. I’m assuming it’s because “&” breaks code, which is why it’s generally converted to “&”. I don’t know if that’s fixable. Also, I know you have this thing about not capitalizing “Internet”, but still, “URL” should be capitalized.
5. Anonymous | March 10th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Um, generally converted to \&
6. Anonymous | March 10th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
No, generally converted to &\amp;
7. Anonymous | March 10th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Ok, the above, but without the backslash. If I write it correctly, it gets converted to &. (See?)
8. tdc | March 10th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
nyt spokeswoman seemed surprised that even with “10x the bandwidth” since 2001 they still crashed.
just goes to show you how “the audience” has moved and now goes to “the source” rather than the local’s offering.
on another note-
that photo of mrs. spitzer: does it look like she’s thinking “now where did i put that ginsu?”
9. KDay | March 11th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Alexa is based on user toolbars. Better gauge is Google Page Rank, in my opinion.
10. Rick Ellis | March 11th, 2008 at 8:41 am
While the issue should be long settled in local TV newsrooms, it’s not.
But this story is a perfect example of why you break news on the web, when it happens.
The Times didn’t wait for this morning’s edition, or until its reporters could break on last night’s cable news programs. They broke it as soon as everyone signed off on the story.
Consider the issue over.
11. Orikinla Osinachi | March 11th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Americans love making so much noise about the private sex lives of others when they would have been wiser to shut up!
A governor is a saint?
He is human and he has the right to have sex with the woman who can give him what the wife could not give him.
I am a Christian, and I treat these issues of the facts of life the way Jesus Christ would have treated it.
Realistically.
America is full of hypocrites!
12. Anonymous | March 11th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
PS: Drudge, HuffPo and Kos all have a PageRank of 7.
13. Anonymous | March 11th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
It’s not the Drudge page views that makes it a success. It’s what he refers you to. Drudge gets 1 hit, 1 page view, 1 visitor. A better way to measure stats would be to take the home page of HuffPo, Kos and rank them to Drudge.
14. Anonymous | March 12th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
As I pointed out, HuffPo and Drudge are tied in reach. That’s not page views.
Drudge automatically refreshes the home page constantly. So if you leave it open in the background, you’re counted as lots of page views. This started when his first advertiser appeared on the site, according to archives.org. And Drudge misidentifies these page views as “visits” in a counter right there on the home page. And nothing’s stopping Drudge from getting more content.
15. John | March 13th, 2008 at 8:12 am
That’s strange… our Broadcast Station has never crashed from heavy viewing… maybe there is a future for broadcasting after all.
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