Net-Metrix: Wave of visitors spills over French news sites
Due to the numerous holidays in May, traffic on many websites was only slightly higher than in April, which had been a slow month for traffic. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s largest French-language news sites recorded one of the heaviest surges in visitor traffic ever measured in Switzerland.
This anomaly was caused by an old pigtail of French legislation. The website operators were forewarned: Since French media were not allowed by law to publish election projections until the last polling stations closed at 8:00 p.m. in the most recent presidential election, it was foreseeable that some of the inquisitive people would look for information on francophone news sites in Switzerland or Belgium. Thus, May 6 became one of the busiest days ever registered in Switzerland. This can be seen in the Net-Metrix audit of May.
The phenomenon was already known from the last presidential election in 2007 - but it was unclear to what extent the French media and citizens would adhere to this seemingly antiquated regulation in the age of globalized social media communication. Net-Metrix - in addition to publishing the traffic figures for May - took a closer look at the daily traffic of the six largest French news sites on May 6 and compared it to a normal Sunday:
In total, Le Temps, 24heures.ch, Lematin.ch, Tribune de Genève, Rts.ch and 20min.ch - Romandie show a significantly higher number of visits as early as 10 am. The analysis of the geolocation shows that the vast majority of devices access the site from France. Over the course of the day, the visit volume increases exponentially, finally reaching its absolute peak at 6:00 p.m. with over 1 million visits per hour.
This volume corresponds to more than 17 times the number of visits on a normal Sunday between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., according to the study. Over the entire day, the six news sites recorded more than 4 million visits, i.e. around 5 times the amount of a quiet Saturday. As early as 19:00, when everyone knew what was officially still secret in France, the onslaught subsided considerably, only to die out completely at 20:00, when the French media were allowed to do their job again. What remained were a few alleged charges from the French side against Swiss and Belgian media houses, as well as hot-running but still functioning measurement boxes at Net-Metrix.
In the monthly figures for the individual sites published on June 8, the peak of May 6, 2012 was much less impressive, but was still clearly recognizable on one or two French news sites: Net-metrix.ch/products/net-metrix-audit/publication
