Obama Breaks Reddit Record With 2.9 Million Pageviews

Sites include Reddit.com . Published on September 13th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

President Obama has pioneered cool and social media involvement at the highest level. But no-one saw what he did recently coming—not even diehard Redditors.

The President sat down recently to do an (Ask Me Anything) AMA session on the popular social news site and within minutes all of Reddit and the internet was set abuzz with the news.

Within minutes, “I am Barack Obama, President of the United States – AMA” hit the front page of Reddit and in the first 15, over 4,000 comments were made on the post. At the time of Obama’s AMA, the post got over 2,987,307 pageviews. That was more than the site received the whole day. Residual pageviews on the post has brought the pageview total to well over 5,280,000.

The AMA was so popular that President Obama captured the attention of more than 30% of Redditors. This was particularly record-breaking because at any given time, no more than 20% of Reddit’s users are active. According to an official release from Reddit, more servers had to be called into action to cope with the additional stress.

In the end Obama spent only 30 minutes and answered 10 questions but for millions of Reddit users, it was an opportunity of a lifetime. The President does Twitter all the time so for Redditors the decision to ‘hang with them’ must have been something special indeed.