January 20th was an important day for all Americans with the inauguration of their 45th president, Donald Trump. The event was broadcast live on television and online and we thought we would check out how traffic on our site was affected during the inauguration. To add an extra dimension we partnered with The Wrap to compare the new stats to the last time the White House changed hands; when President Obama was sworn in for the first time in 2009.
Throughout the day, RedTube traffic across the United States dropped by 13% , compared to only -8% during the 2009 Inauguration. Looking at hourly traffic to the site, it seems as though President Trump’s inauguration had very little effect on our traffic. Usually daily traffic falls below average between 4am and 10am, and around 11am it starts to pick up until it peaks at midnight. On Trump’s inauguration day, we see that traffic hit its lowest at 11am, right when the inauguration started and then began to pick up again around 12:30pm- very close to the norms. Whereas during Obama’s first inauguration, we see very clear peaks in traffic before and immediately after his swearing in- likely because even the most loyal among our viewers didn’t want to miss the historic event.
When we compare the traffic in this same way from state to state, we can see that in 2009, traffic in typically Democratic states have some of the greatest drops in traffic during the swearing in of the former President. Most areas of the United States saw a decrease in traffic, however there were a few that experienced an increase. Republican states like West Virginia and Alabama actually saw an increase in traffic during President Obama’s inauguration, perhaps because they had to let off a load to ease the fact that it wasn’t their party’s leader coming into the white house.
During the 2017 inauguration of President Trump, while South Dakota and North Dakota had the highest increase in traffic on Friday (up 11% and 10%, respectively), the states with the largest drops in traffic included Oklahoma (-32%), Kansas (-28%) and New Mexico (-25%). Besides Oklahoma and Kansas, other states that saw a decrease in traffic included Montana, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. All of which generally known as red states, leading us to believe they may have been waiting patiently to see President Trump, the Republican candidate, be sworn in as 45th President of the USA on the news.
We also took a quick look at popular search terms now and then. In 2009 ‘Obama’ increased a whopping 844%, while searches ‘Sarah Palin,’ who made quite a few waves during the 2009 electoral campaign, increased by 79%.
This year on the other hand, RedTube viewers kept it in the family…for the most part. Searches for the new First Lady increased by 970% while searches for President Trumps’ daughters Ivanka and Tiffany increased by 390% and 379%, and searches for the Donald grew by 253%. The POTUS’ campaign manager made an appearance as well with searches for ‘Kelly Trump Anal” increasing by 321%. It should also be noted that searches for ‘Golden Showers’ were up by 50%.
For those interested in how traffic in each state was effected in 2009 vs 2017, take a look at the chart below.
