BBC.com saw record-breaking visitor numbers – 31 million visitors on Wednesday, November 4th – as world awaited US election results.
• The figure was nearly 50% higher than the previous peak, which was around the EU referendum.
• It was also 12 million higher than the equivalent day during the 2016 US election (+63%).
• Four out of every five visitors to the site consumed election content on the day.
• The story generated 127m page views, which was 40m higher than 2016 results day (+44%).
• This far surpassed the daily peak around coronavirus coverage, which itself had garnered extremely high figures.
• Since August, election coverage has generated a quarter of a billion page views.
The peak in figures was reflected across the globe, with 11.5 million visitors in the US, 2.4m in Canada, 1.3 million in Australia and 1 million visitors in both India and Japan – in many cases double the average daily run rate.
Video views also surged, hitting 3 million – the second highest daily figure to date, with close to two million streams of the live coverage.
From a sales perspective, the BBC was able to monetize a large proportion of this surge in inventory programmatically, with sold impressions more than doubling and programmatic revenue increasing by 54%.
David Weiland, CEO of BBC Global News, said: “2020 has been an unprecedented year of truly global stories and the US election is yet another example of an event from which the impact will be felt across many continents.
“As the world’s, and America’s, most trusted international news broadcaster, it is pleasing to see audiences turning to us in such big numbers when they need accurate and impartial analysis of world-changing events.”
Earlier this year, the Reuters Institute 2020 Digital News Report found that BBC News is the most trusted news brand in the United States.
A full 56% of US respondents rated the BBC as “trustworthy”, which the study counts as a trust rating of six to ten points out of ten, putting BBC News second only to “local television news”, and ahead of all major US news brands.
The annual study of media consumption is one of the most rigorous and influential reports on global attitudes towards journalism.
Despite rising partisanship in news coverage in the United States, the study also found a majority of respondents – 60% – prefer objective news, “with no point of view”, of the kind produced by BBC News.
The results of the survey build on many others showing the broad appeal of the BBC’s objective news. Earlier in 2020, the Pew Trust in Media Study found that BBC News was among just three outlets trusted more than distrusted by both Republicans and Democrats in the US.
In 2019, a comprehensive global study from globalwebindex of TV and digital news, surveying 138,000 respondents, found BBC News to be the world’s most trustworthy news service.
In 2018, the BBC was named News Brand of the Year by Harris Poll and found to be ‘TV’s Most Trusted News Brand’ in study from MediaPost and Brand Keys.