Washington – How popular was the long-awaited report on U.S. policy in Iraq? Enough to turn a little-noticed website into an Internet star for the day.
In the first hour that the United States Institute of Peace posted the report Wednesday morning, 450 visitors clicked on its website every second, said institute spokesman Ian Larsen. By 5 in the afternoon, it was still experiencing 100 to 200 hits per second, he said.
Normally, the site – www.usip.org – is visited 9,000 times a day.
During the first five hours the report was online, it was downloaded from the institute’s site 400,000 times, Larsen said.
The Internet’s most popular sites are visited millions of times daily.
The institute, an independent but federally financed organization, was one of four official sites that posted the report online. The others were the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
