While the first Clinton-Trump presidential debate drew tons of viewers away from ESPN’s Monday Night Football this week, the debate worked out very well indeed for one of ESPN’s other properties: FiveThirtyEight.
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Last night’s inaugural 2016 Presidential Debate marked not only an unprecedented occasion to viewers around the country but also to FiveThirtyEight: The site reached its all-time single day record traffic across all metrics during the event, including 8.2 million minutes and an average minute audience of 5,720, according to Adobe Analytics.
Specifically, between 9 p.m. and midnight ET, FiveThirtyEight attracted 30,700 average minute impressions and peaked at 40,500 between 10 and 11 p.m.
What sort of content was the site putting up Monday? Well, a lot of it was relevant to the debate. When it comes to specifically debate-focused content, FiveThirtyEight ran “Your Debate Briefing Book: The Politics,” “Your Debate Briefing Book: The Policies,” “First Debates Usually Go To The Challenger,” and a podcast titled “What’s At Stake For Both Candidates In Tonight’s Debate?” They also covered topics that weren’t specifically about the debate but wound up being brought up during the debate, such as “Murders Rose At Their Fastest Pace In A Quarter-Century Last Year” (subhead: “But they remain well below their peak”), “The Income Gap Began To Narrow Under Obama” and the regular “Significant Digits” feature, which included several political and debate stories.
Silver himself penned an update on the polls and the FiveThirtyEight election forecast that was published just before the debate. There was sports content, too, including a Neil Paine piece on Arnold Palmer’s statistical greatness and a Chase Stuart piece on the Vikings’ and Ravens’ performances so far, but it seems likely that the political and debate content was most linked to the traffic surge. (It’s also worth noting that much of FiveThirtyEight’s traffic isn’t about any particular article, but rather their frequently-updated election forecast.)
FiveThirtyEight also appears to have been focusing on capturing the debate interest in Tuesday’s post-debate content. Pieces published Tuesday include Silver’s “Clinton Won The Debate, Which Means She’s Likely To Gain In The Polls,” “Video: FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Crew Analyzes The Debate,” and “Trump And Clinton Sounded As If They Were Talking About Two Different Countries.”
FiveThirtyEight has done well with a wide variety of stats-based content, but the appetite for political and debate coverage probably makes it particularly smart to focus on those areas right now, and that’s what they seem to be doing. It’s also notable that ESPN’s release suggests Monday wasn’t an anomaly, but part of a trend of overall growth for the site:
The Presidential Election continues to rapidly drive the site’s audience. According to comScore, last month FiveThirtyEight set a record of new time spent, with users engaging with the site for more than 90.8 million minutes, a growth of more than 435 percent compared to the same month last year. The site also attracted 9.5 million unique visitors in August — the second highest total in its history – and received over 89 million page views, a 523 percent increase compared to last year, according to comScore.
FiveThirtyEight’s Election Forecast was the most popular piece of individual content across all of ESPN’s web properties for the month of August.
ESPN’s acquisition of FiveThirtyEight has taken some criticism at times, and it hasn’t always been clear how the political content in particular fits in at a company that’s often trying to avoid politics. However, the numbers here show the value for ESPN in operating this site, especially as a diversification play.
If people continue to show more interest in the election and the debates than ESPN’s typical sports properties, FiveThirtyEight is one of their few sites set up to take advantage of that.
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