The elections are a done deal, Donald Trump is the 45th American President (yeah !) and here we are, with some number crunching on the tech front. Conducted by broadband network company Sandvine, a study of Internet usage on election night suggests, that folks in the United States still trust television networks over the web when it comes to important, breaking stuff.
Social networks however, continued to be a user favourite as people came in huge numbers to express their feelings and emotions over this year’s election results. And while I don’t have many people from North America on my timeline, the election result reaction was a hit here in India too, pretty much stamping the every significant role, social media plays in our day-to-day lives.
In terms of numbers, Twitter saw a double digit growth as compared to its usual traffic on election night, while Facebook saw a slightly lesser, but significant 30% increment in overall traffic. This again highlights, that despite all the woes Twitter is currently dealing with, it continues to be a breaking news ticker of sorts for people, wherein users are massively approaching to look for quick, hassle-free updates.
Netflix — as one would expect — did not find too many takers for its service on election night. The streaming service, which is otherwise the largest source of traffic in North America, saw a 25% decline in traffic when compared with previous day. Of course traffic will start to gain up as election results euphoria settles down, it’ll be a long time though.
As Sandwine’s Dan Deeth rightly puts,
Instead of using their big screen TVs to watch Stranger Things on Netflix, subscribers may have been glued to the strange things being shown in the news coverage.
On an overall basis, the web saw a 15% overall decrease in traffic, largely because almost the entire world stayed glued to television networks to see election outcome. This, even though is usual in such times, continues to show that we are still a lot behind times, when we would see streaming services taking over television when it comes to important stuff.
