Just as the Republican National Convention is about to wrap up tonight, the Democratic National Convention Committee released some interesting numbers about its web presence during the Democratic convention last week. During the convention week, the official Web site received more than 3.2 million visits. Also, visitors to the DNC site watched a total of more than 360,000 hours of online video from the convention.
SilverStripe
The convention site was built on top of SilverStripe, a New Zealand based open source content management system we reviewed last year. In the review, we noted that SilverStripe had great potential, especially for those who needed a CMS with more functionality than traditional blogging platforms, yet with less complexity than traditional CMS system. The fact that it worked so well under high load during the Democratic convention confirms our first impression.
SilverLight
Just like NBC did during the Olympics, the convention site used Microsoft’s SliverLight platform to stream live and recorded video feeds, many of them in HD quality.
According to the DNC, the average web viewer had watched just a bit over 80 minutes of video by the end of the week. This seems to be in line with the Olympics, where the average viewer watched around 15-20 minutes a day of online video.
Just as with the Olympics, the fact that online video streams were available was not detrimental to traditional TV networks. Instead, the TV ratings for this year eclipsed those of 2004 by 54%.
What About the Republicans?
The Republican Convention has partnered with UStream to broadcast its speeches online. Also, the GOP convention site uses YouTube to stream its recorded videos, which does not have the same quality as the SilverLight videos the DNC uses.
On the other hand, though, most users don’t have to install any specific software to watch the flash videos on YouTube, so it will be interesting to see what the statistics for the GOP convention web site are going to look like once they are released.
