Twitter, Facebook the real winners of election night — Netflix not so lucky

While web traffic was down nearly 15 percent on election night, Facebook and Twitter reaping huge traffic boosts suggest more people are turning to real-time conversation platforms as a so-called second screen. This isn’t new, of course, but it further documents a shift in watch behavior.

Gone are the days of tuning in to a program and tuning out the world. Today, we use our phones, tablets and laptops to engage in real-time conversation about what we’re seeing and this was more apparent than ever last night as ‘TV [Trumped] the Internet,’ according to broadband intelligence company Sandvine.

During last night’s election, traffic spiked on both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter saw its traffic numbers double, while Facebook showed an increase of almost 30 percent.

Netflix didn’t fare quite so well. Normally the largest source of internet traffic in North America, the site saw a 25 percent decline in traffic levels compared with the previous day. Sandvine believes this was temporary, and that Netflix users once again tune in to binge their favorite shows tonight.

The findings are based on a sample fixed network on the East Coast. The samples have been fairly representative of national traffic in the past, the company notes. The figures, however, are still preliminary and the company plans to update them throughout the day.

via TechCrunch