As citizens swarmed the Capitol Mall in record numbers to be within earshot of Tuesday’s historic presidential inauguration, they stormed the Internet in equal measure.

In fact, people with Obama fever broke records across Yahoo! News on Tuesday, seeking as much news and information as possible. Let’s take a look at why:

• Historic milestone – That’s the no-brainer. It seemed that whether or not Americans voted for President Obama, they appreciated the significance of inaugurating our first African-American president. Global interest in this American tradition was never higher.
• Net news rules – As the Pew Research Center reported in December, the Internet has surpassed newspapers and all other mediums except television for national and international news. And even that is destined to change, considering 6 in 10 people under age 30 prefer the Web to TV for news. As more people turned to the Web on Tuesday, we saw our highest traffic day ever on Yahoo! News, with 12.3 million unique visitors (the equivalent of the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined) logging 329 million page views. These eye-popping figures beat our previous records around Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.
• Web video has arrived – Online video is no longer seen as a spotty, unreliable medium fraught with outages and buffering, as it might have been in 2000 and 2004. While hiccups can still happen, it seems people now confidently log on to live news coverage online knowing they won’t miss a thing. That was paramount on Tuesday because the inauguration and ensuing festivities fell during the workday for Americans. Yahoo! News upped our video server capacity as we logged record video streams, surpassing even Election Day coverage.
• Photos attract – People like news stories, but they can’t seem to get enough of photos – both news agency and user generated. On average, people viewed more than 70 images per person among our 56 inauguration-related slideshows (vs. our normal 40 photos per person). Not surprisingly, the most viewed set was of First Daughters Malia and Sasha. Over at Flickr, people tagged more than 150,000 photos and videos with terms related to the inauguration, along with those newly submitted to the Commons by partners like the Smithsonian that show historic images of past inaugurations.

As demand for online news continues to grow, our team will look for new ways to help you sort through the volume of news information and formats available. Who knows what the next record-breaking event will be?

But one thing’s for sure. It’s nice to see Internet news come of age.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP & GM, Yahoo! News