Jason Calacanis, the former CEO of Engadget’s parent company, Weblogs, Inc., told me earlier today that the site had nearly 10 million page views on Tuesday when they covered the iPhone announcement – ten times their normal traffic of a million or so page views per day.
Engadget, the top ranked blog on Technorati, can no longer really be put in the same pack as other big blogs. Putting this into perspective, that’s about three months worth of traffic for TechCrunch in one day on Engadget, and we’re no. 4 on the Technorati list. And it is more than 2x the traffic that Gizmodo, the second largest gadget blog, saw that day (reinforcing the 80/20 rule). Our own gadget blog, CrunchGear, had a record day in traffic as well, albeit on a much smaller scale.
With massive numbers of readers flocking to blogs when big news is announced, it’s hard to say that mainstream audiences aren’t paying attention. Just about everyone that cares knew exactly what was being announced at MacWorld just moments after it was said, and they got the news from Engadget or another blog. Pictures and video were available real time as well. By the time television and newspapers got to the story, the really interested readers were already on to the next thing.