YOU can’t beat the thrill of a good exclusive and the worldwide interest in Scot, Susan Boyle – following her singing appearance on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent – last week resulted in the Daily Record’s name going well and truly global.
For, just as Friday’s print edition of the paper ‘hitting the streets’, its website was exclusively reporting that Boyle had recorded a song a decade previously.
And www.dailyrecord.co.uk had a copy of the recording: of the classic, Cry Me a River.
Writes online editor, Iain Hepburn, on his blog: “The sheer volume of [online] interest in Susan from the States saw the traffic rise, and rise, and rise… to the point where we were struggling to serve the video and sustain the rest of the infrastructure at the same time.
“The first indication we got that things were really going northwards was when [HQ] Canary Wharf’s digital gurus asked if we’d move the video onto YouTube, since the bandwidth demands for it were proving intense.”
On Friday, www.dailyrecord.co.uk received around 560,000 page views, of which 337,000 were of the Boyle story alone – easily beating the paper’s previous record for a single online story.
The story, by Laura Coventry, went particularly stratospheric when east coast USA work up, around 2pm UK-time.
On Saturday and Sunday, the page view numbers for the whole of the Record website were again much higher than normally: understood to be 359,000 and 165,000.
And by then, the story was up on YouTube where it was being read by hundreds of thousands of other people – almost three million (at the time of writing) on one post alone.
