Tornado warning breezes past Journal website traffic records
Web traffic highlight of the week: Tornado warning
A funnel cloud touched down over Pigeon Lake, but the storm that swept across Edmonton on the afternoon of June 12 still blew away all the web traffic competition, leaving broken records in its wake.
Let’s start with unique visitors to the website: in one day, more than 150,000 readers, the highest in months (and the only day in 2013 thus far comparable to the March 21 snow storm). And on mobile, that number climbed to more than 500,000.
That number is just for one storm story. In fact, it doubles when you factor in the rest of the website traffic that day, briefly making the Journal the most-read newspaper in the nationwide Postmedia network.
Factor in the series of alerts the Journal sent out about the storm and you have a strong contender for the biggest story of the year. The fact that the storm passed in a few hours and damage was minimal – some light flooding, a few wet basements. Evidently readers are still understandably skittish about tornadoes, 26 years after the one that ripped through Edmonton.
Social media story of the week: AHS board fired
Really, this ranking could go to the tornado story as well: the initial story lit up the news feed of more than 21,000 people via the Journal’s Facebook feed. But in interest of balance, let’s pay homage to the other big story of the week: the Alberta Health Services board getting the axe after it challenged Health Minister Fred Horne over his demand to withhold their performance pay. The story sparked on the afternoon of June 11 and slowly grew until the mass firings the following morning.
Video and audio files embedded on the Journal website helped the story erupt on Facebook (highest percentage of share-per-view of the week) and, oddly enough, Reddit, where its politically charged nature helped it beat out even the tornado warning.
Video of the week: Goosecam
I promise this is the last time this year that I’ll talk about Patience the goose unless she gets confused and starts nesting in September or something crazy. But her kids hatched this week, bringing with them another 6,000 hours of birdwatching. The year’s total, for anyone counting, 2.3 years of Goosecam footage was consumed. At this point in its sixyear history, the Goosecam is practically an institution – and shows no sign of stopping. See you next April, ornithologists.
Photo gallery of the week: Reader’s tornado pictures
One last mention to the biggest story of the week, and then I’ll stop: a gallery of reader-submitted photos attracted more than 180,000 page views and furnished the looming funnel cloud shot from local photographer Bill Hodgetts. That one shot was probably worth an easy 50,000 page views all by itself.