The Guardian says:
We also experienced a significant rise in membership with the highest volume of member sign-ups in a single day to date, 25 times higher than the average day - further demonstrating the value and importance that readers attach to our quality, independent reporting.
Over 23 million unique browsers accessed Guardian journalism - our biggest ever day, overtaking the previous record of 17.2 million who had followed our coverage online as the UK’s EU referendum results came in. Page views were also up on Brexit, more than 8m above that day’s 77m record. Overall traffic peaked at 7.34 am GMT with over 200k page views per minute as Donald Trump emerged as President-elect - double Brexit’s peak.
Readers from all over the world relied on the live results tracker for real-time data visualisations that displayed the results of the US elections, along with background and ongoing assessment. This was the most viewed piece of journalism - hitting over 21 million page views over the course of the night and following day - double the equivalent of the tracker for the Brexit referendum.
The Guardian’s live blog covering the night’s events was viewed over 12 million times - with readers primarily from the UK, US and Canada following Guardian reporters to make sense of the unfolding events.
Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, Guardian News & Media said: "There's no doubt that the election of Donald Trump as US president is one of the biggest events of our lifetimes, and like the outcome of the Brexit referendum, could be one of the most important stories in the history of the Guardian. In this time of deep uncertainty, more people than ever have visited the Guardian for our engaged reporting and video, deep analysis and thoughtful commentary. Never has the world needed independent journalism more than now and our teams around the globe will continue to produce clear, well-sourced, calm and accessible journalism in the weeks, months and years ahead."
Other key pieces of journalism pulled in high volumes of readers, including the business live blog and a wide range of agenda-setting opinion pieces - demonstrating a clear demand for intelligent, liberal and trusted analysis. The Guardian’s ‘Dab’ - a short bespoke explainer video made for Facebook - which showed the breakdown of Trump voters has had over 1.65m video starts to date, showing that our readers are consuming Guardian journalism across multiple platforms.
The mobile innovation lab pioneered a series of notification formats and providing readers with multiple ways to engage with Guardian journalism in real time. The experiment with live, updating notifications allowed subscribers to keep track of election results on their mobile lock screens. As a result, 230k app users signed up to receive the alerts, driving 650k combined page views to the mobile traffic to the live blog and results tracker.
