Big traffic increase this week for Apple blogs

Steve Smith of minonline writes about how blogs and sites that cover Apple reported a large increase in traffic this week due to the iPhone 5 announcement.

Smith writes, “IDG’s Macworld.com reports that its live blog of the Apple presentation in San Francisco drew 300,000 unique visitors. The event gave the site twice its typical day’s traffic.

“At Conde Nast’s Ars Technica they employed a proprietary platform built for just such an occasion. The special area of the site allowed for live blog posts to work seamlessly with image feeds as well as user commentary. The area was also designed to withstand hard hits to the servers and still perform.

“And the platform came in handy yesterday. Ars Technica recorded its highest traffic day ever because of the iPhone 5 event. It counted 15.3 million page views, 500% the daily average. The live blog platform got a whopping 13.2 million of those pages, up from 8 million for the iPhone 4S launch. As for unique, it drew 684,000.

“Searches for ‘iPhone 5’ had already been up over 100% in August, according to reports.

“Which is not to say that interest was unprecedented everywhere. Jacob Ward, editor-in-chief of Popular Science, tells minonline that his site’s live blog of the roll-out did get a characteristic bump, but not of quite scale or longevity one might expect. ‘It was our highest-trafficked topic of the day, what with our liveblog of the event, but was eclipsed by other unrelated topics the following day — science miscellany and the like,’ he says.”

Read more here.