Running our digital news platform during the Corona crisis
In this post we will shed some light on the impact the Corona crisis has had on our digital news platforms up until now. We will try to offer some explanations on the patterns that are surfacing and reflect on incidents that occured under recent extreme conditions.
About NOS
NOS is an independent public news and sports organization based in the Netherlands. We are a traditional radio and tv broadcaster by origin, but in the last decades we’ve witnessed that digital and especially mobile consumption have become the dominant platforms for news. At NOS we have a dedicated team of around 25 digital professionals that create and maintain these platforms.
Digital analytics
I like to look at our digital analytics as a reflection on what customers do with our digital product. In a way it makes our efforts accountable, however there’s always a story behind the numbers. In this case the story is unmistakably the Corona crisis. The graph below displays the surge of traffic on our biggest platform:
In the beginning of February there was a small spike, due to the Ciara storm which was impacting life in northern Europe. From the end of February the Corona-crisis started dominating the news in the Netherlands. The spikes in March are days on which the Dutch government held press conferences to announce new measures to mitigate the crisis. The biggest spike was on Sunday March 15th when the government announced an ‘intelligent lockdown’. The graph below displays the traffic of this day on our biggest platform:
Compared to other weekdays Sundays have a large amount of traffic on average, mainly because of sporting events. But March 15th was a very extreme example. As the corona crisis had been building up in the weeks before, traffic was about double the normal average from the early morning on. News on the looming lockdown was developing during the day and the government scheduled a press conference at the end of the afternoon to address the nation. We announced this event in our liveblog and shortly before the start at 17.00 we sent out a push notification. The number of customers responding to this notification was extremely high, too high for our infrastructure to handle.
The ‘thundering herd’
Our infrastructure is designed to handle a high number of concurrent livestream viewers. During big sports events like the Olympic Games or the Football World Cup a lot of people tune in to our livestreams. Our systems usually see the online audience gradually building up, and we adapt by rerouting traffic and lowering stream quality to maximize network capacity and serve as much customers possible. That’s the goal for NOS.
On March 15th the push notification for the press conference triggered an influx of an enormous amount of users at the same time. Within minutes several hundreds of thousands of customers started the livestream. This level of stress on our systems was so high it froze our system resources. As a result customers could not enter the stream and were stuck with a blank screen. In the technical community this phenomenon is referred to as a ‘thundering herd’. You could describe this with the analogy of a highway: the highway has enough capacity to handle the total amount of traffic but when too many people want to get on the highway at the same time, the access ramp becomes blocked and everything comes to a halt.
After this incident we scaled up our resources, we made improvements in the efficiency of our software and are now carefully monitoring performance. Also we agreed with our editorial team on opening up future livestreams earlier, so the audience can gradually build up instead of everyone arriving at the same time. To spread the audience even further we started publishing livestreams on other platforms like Youtube and redirect people to the Dutch VOD-platform NPO Start.
As you can see in the first graph, activity has now been somewhat normalized as the Corona crisis has become ‘the new normal’. However we’re still seeing significantly more customers than in the months preceding the crisis. Our customers are in need of more information to organize daily life, and we’re grateful so many customers trust us to inform them.
Kids and news during the Corona crisis
We have a dedicated digital service called Jeugdjournaal with news for children between 7 and 12 years old. The graph below illustrates the daily usage in the last few months:
As you can see the usage of Jeugdjournaal online has a typical pattern. On weekdays Jeugdjournaal is used in classrooms to watch the news and to discuss a daily poll. In the weekends there are no primary school classes so there’s less activity on the Jeugdjournaal digital platforms. Primary school sessions dictate patterns in usage. This explains the decline in traffic in weekdays at the end of December. This is a holiday period and primary schools are closed. You see this repeating at the end of February, also due to a holiday period.
As a result of the ‘intelligent lockdown’ in the Netherlands primary schools were closed from March 16th onward. I first expected the Jeugdjournaal traffic to decline. But as you can see the results are the opposite. We’ve also looked at the activity within a day and we see the exact same patters on weekdays now — during the lockdown — as we did during regular weekdays. Our current hypothesis is that parents who are homeschooling children hold on to the daily routines that kids are used to in primary school. We’ll have to investigate this phenomenon further to validate this, but we’re grateful children and their parents keep trusting Jeugdjournaal to inform them on the latest news.
As the news on this crisis develops we’ll be monitoring activity on our platforms closely. If you have any questions please let us know in the comments.
