BBC’s volcano coverage generates a record 5.5m users in one day – guardian.co.uk

Jemima Kiss reporting on BBC News Online's stats for reporting of Eyjafjallajökull:

"its biggest ever traffic weekend for the 17 to 18 April with more than five million unique users on Saturday and 5.5 million on Sunday.

The busiest single story was the breaking news about the volcano last Thursday with an astonishing four million views in one day – the busiest story of 2010 so far.

"We've covered all the angles we've been able to get to, putting in extra editorial, production and newsgathering effort to ramp up and sustain the level of coverage on the website and elsewhere," said BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann.

"This is something genuinely unexpected, with far-reaching effects, and still unpredictable, and that's reflected in the audience interest, which has been big from the start, and remains high."

[…]

A live volcano news page recorded more than one million views over the two days and overall, eight of the ten busiest stories were volcano related."

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