News24 Nigeria broke all records last week with their coverage of the Nigerian election. The elections site clocked over 55-million page views over four days in March; with 38-million page views on news articles and live updates and 8,7-million page views on the live results maps.
“The results completely exceeded our expectations,” says Corli van der Merwe, Africa editor at 24.com. “At 11pm on Monday evening (30 March) we hit our peak at 102 000 active users. At that point we were serving 500 pages per second. This completely smashed our previous record of 375 pages per second which News24 hit during the South African elections last year.”
The award-winning 24.com product development team set the benchmark for election reporting with the 2014 South African elections, the results of which were used in the planning for the Nigerian elections. The world-class interactive results maps, the live news feed and user-generated content platform (My2015) were all seamlessly integrated across web and mobile-web. Mobile came out the clear winner, with 98% of all traffic via mobile devices.
Successes like this have a massive impact on commercial reach too, often introducing new audiences for established brands. “This election coverage was sponsored entirely by PriceCheck who are building their brand in West Africa. They are happy with the results,” says Andrea van den Bergh, News24 Nigeria Channel Sales Manager at The SpaceStation, the digital media sales company that exclusively represents News24.
