Online news outlets expect traffic surge

According to the New York Times, Yahoo! News is preparing for an unprecedented amount of traffic on and after election night.

The site had 80 million page views on election day in 2004 and 142 million the day after, when John Kerry conceded to George W. Bush. “We expect to do twice and perhaps three times as much traffic in 2008,” [Vice President for Programming and Development Neeraj] Khemlani said.

By comparison, The New York Times website drew 20 million visitors in all of September. The Times, however, has high expectations of its own, according to Reuters:

As does CNN, the New York Times expects to have record traffic on election day, said Jim Roberts, associate managing editor at the paper, who added that the site has come a long way since the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
"Our imagination is bigger and our tool box is much bigger," Roberts said.

Newspaper sites like The NY Times would love to draw as much traffic as possible away from aggregators like Yahoo! News, which present obstacles to newspaper's ability to earn money from the content they create.

For more, read the New York Times article and the Reuters article.