6 fascinating stats about President Obama’s Reddit AMA

Reddit had already let slip that President’ Obama’s AMA was really, really popular, to the tune of about 3 million unique visitors over two days. Now the social news site has released even more stats that just confirm the obvious: Obama’s visit was Reddit’s best day ever.

Here are a few of the most interesting nuggets from the site’s newest data.

• * In seven years of Reddit history, President Obama’s AMA is the only page to ever receive more traffic than the homepage, with 30 percent more than the site at its peak.
• * The AMA received nearly 2,987,307 pageviews when it ran on Aug. 29, with a total of 5,280,441 pageviews (and counting).
• * Reddit received over 100,000 pageviews per minute at the AMA’s peak.
• * President Obama’s user page received 428,004 pageviews on the day he answered questions.
• * The site added the 30 dedicated servers—or 20 percent its usual total—to handle the traffic surge. Even with that, the site still crashed, and staff had to pull in an additional 30 servers just to keep the site running.
• * The president’s username (PresidentObama) was created by someone else, who’d deleted their account years ago. Breaking official policy, the staff resurrected the account and the name. “If you are not a current or former head of state, don’t ask us for a deleted username,” the site wrote in the blog post.

The site also added some lines clearly meant to answer critics of the AMA:

“Did it go perfectly smooth? Nope. Is this the absolute perfect format for politicians to answer questions? Nope. But it worked, and it was a big step, not just for reddit, but for online communities everywhere.”

Photo via hlkljgk/Flickr