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The Enhanced 2015 State of the Union: By the Numbers

January 21, 2015 at 5:00 PM ET by Nathaniel Lubin

Summary:

Check out the numbers behind our Enhanced 2015 State of the Union.

Every year, we do everything we can to step up our game around the State of the Union, using new approaches to engage the public online in different and compelling ways. We want to give people a better way to understand the President’s policies and why they’re important to them and their communities. This year, the goal was no different, but we rolled out an exciting new a range of improved platforms, coordinating with the White House policy and speechwriting offices to build digital content into the speech itself. Find out more here.

We’re still running through the numbers, but we wanted to share an early look at our top 10 favorite statistics about how you, the public, reacted to the President’s second-to-last SOTU:

We enhanced the stream with 127 slides, and launched 89 “boats” for our river of content.
There were more than 1.2 million views of the enhanced State of the Union live stream.
Peak concurrent traffic was roughly 50% higher than the 2014 SOTU, and people stayed on the stream for 45% longer.
More than 75,000 people stuck around to watch a post-speech interview with Huffington Post Politics (streamed from the White House YouTube feed).
For the technically inclined: we had about 16,000 http requests per second at our peak, a level comparable to some of the most popular websites in the world (for example, Netflix cites 20,000 requests per second to their API).
At our peak engagement, more than 50% of users were viewing WhiteHouse.gov via a mobile device or tablet.
A total of 1,575,475 tweets and retweets used #SOTU on the day of the speech – about 25% growth relative to 2014, and @WhiteHouse gained roughly 10 times as many followers as compared to a typical day.
The posted transcript of the speech as prepared for delivery, where it was first released, has been viewed more than 400,000 times. That’s our best engagement yet on Medium.
For the first time, we released real-time clips from the speech, garnering almost 1.5 million views on Facebook during the speech.
Our announcement video for our Big Block of Cheese Day currently has more than 730,000 views – check it out if you haven’t, it’s gouda – then ask a question.