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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.