WhiteHouse.gov Viewership Soaring
Within seconds of President Obama's swearing-in ceremony, the new
president's media team wiped out the Bush administration's Website and launched
its own. The first post to the site was from Macon Phillips, Obama's new media
director. "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov," he wrote.
Traffic to the site has soared since then, according to the latest numbers from
Nielsen, driven primarily by video. Unique viewers of video content increased
236 percent month-over-month, growing from 75,000 in February to 252,000 in
March, while total video streams increased 350 percent during the same time
period.
"The proliferation of video across the site, from the President's weekly
video address to video segments on the site's blog, has helped spur this
impressive growth," Nielsen wrote in a media notice.
Surprisingly, viewers leading the charge to the White House site are not the 18-to-24-year-old
demographic that dominated Obama's campaign site. Instead, it's the 35-to-49-year-old
segment that is putting up the big numbers at WhiteHouse.gov, followed by
people older than 65. The 18-to-24-year-old set is a distance third.
