Visualizing CNN Traffic Patterns

CNN has recently relaunched their website, focusing heavily on Video and the “iReport” social features.  “Feltron” was given the job of analyzing their web statistics and visualizing the traffic patterns over the last 13 years.  It’s a massive amount of datathat he’s trimmed down into an impressive collection of graphs.

The spike chart of average weekly page views forms the centerpiece of the chart. The busiest 10 weeks are called out, and the events associated with the week are highlighted below the x-axis… along with other events of cultural significance or large week-over-week gains. I also tracked the absolute and relative growth of their site categories over time, and highlighted several unique metrics at the top of the chart, including the busiest and slowest days of the year, and the number of countries that visit the site (192 at last count). Finally, to put everything in context, I found milestones in the history of the Internet for each year which I placed along the bottom of the chart to create context for the narrative.

via feltron — In conjunction with the relaunch of their website,….

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

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