The magazine’s No. 1 story last month was not about bin Laden per se, but related: Cats of War, a slideshow revealing “the Pentagon’s top-secret feline special-operations program.” That cunning bit of lolcattery brought in a cool 3.7 million pageviews, Plotz said. Other top stories included William Saletan’s piece arguing Osama bin Laden’s porn stash might have harmed his image more than his record of mass murder, as well as Annie Lowrey’s explainer on who gets the FBI’s $25 million OBL bounty (no one)…

…The magazine has since hired a new technology director, Dan Check, to improve search engine optimization; and an “innovations editor,” Katherine Goldstein, who managed the relaunch of The Slatest as a HuffPost-y news blog. The Slatest saw a 30 percent jump in pageviews from April to May, from 1.8 million to 2.6 million. Inbound traffic from Facebook and Twitter grew 600 percent over the year before, Plotz said, and editors are continuing to experiment with social media. Slate’s popular Twitter feed has become more conversational, less institutional, and a touch political at times.

Bin Laden (and cats!) deliver record month for news sites

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While not at peak traffic levels, page views for half of the Gawker sites are higher than they were this time last year, according to data from comScore.

Page views have been rising at all but two of the Gawker sites since the initial drop after relaunch

Gawker sites see page views begin to return as Jezebel’s April traffic bests last year’s

Earlier this year, Denton bet Rex Sorgatz that Gawker Media’s pageviews would go up this year.

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Publishers can now request an audit for their app traffic to evaluate how many users are visiting a website driven from an app, in comparison to those who simply go straight to a site…

…Media owners can either display their figures on a Web Traffic Certificate, which enables them to report app traffic alongside other online website traffic, or on a separate Certificate of App Traffic.

ABC launches app traffic metrics

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Fox News may rule on cable, but on the web, CNN’s the leader–and its website is crushing the online efforts of the titans of print. According to ComScore, for the first three months of 2011, CNN averaged nearly 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors each day. The best-performing newspaper, The New York Times, was ranked third on the ComScore list with an average 5.6 million.

Traffic Data: Cable News, Led By CNN, Crushing Newspapers On The Web

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- Between Sunday evening when news broke about bin Laden’s death through 1p today, CNN.com has generated 88 million global page views, a 217% gain over the prior 4-week average for the same time period (10 PM-1PM, Sunday to Monday).
- In that time there were also 13.8 million global video starts (live and VOD) on CNN.com, a 725% gain over the prior 4-week average. On Sunday alone, CNN.com had 2.6 million live video views, up more than 100 times the usual levels due, in large part, to news of bin Laden’s death.
- CNN iReport has received 407 submissions related to bin Laden’s death with 71 vetted for use on CNN. Submissions are 35% higher than the first day of breaking news of the earthquake inJapan.

- CNN Mobile’s website had 7.7 million global page views on Sunday, a 153% increase over the same day prior 4-week average, due in large part to news of bin Laden’s death. Page views for Monday through 10a were 5.1 million, up 146% from the prior 4-Mondays during the same time-frame.
– CNN’s mobile web had 26.7 thousand domestic video starts on Sunday, a 23% gain over the same day prior 4-week average. Video views on Monday were 56.4 thousand through 10a, a 906% increase over the prior 4-Monday average.

CNN Digital Traffic: Osama bin Laden’s death

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On an average day, Gizmodo receives over 4 million page views, an incredible number. But what about today? In the hour that Steve Jobs was making his announcement, Gizmodo received over 1.3 million page views.

There has been a ton of speculation over which is a bigger news event: State of the Union or Apple’s announcement. It’ll be interesting to check out the site statistics on sites like Daily Kos and Instapundit during Obama’s speech.

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I’ve been documenting the shifting web traffic trends in political blogs for months. Some have argued that the Democratic Obama administration and Congress is fueling reader interest in conservative blogs as they’ve become part of the opposition.

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